


Working Theory

by notagooddriver



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: A little smut as a treat, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, F/M, Human AU, Lucifer is damaged, Mentions of an offscreen suicide, Past Child Abuse, Spoilers up to season 5A I guess just to be safe, Vaguely follows first episode, chloe is angsty, overuse of em dashes, religious trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28388055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notagooddriver/pseuds/notagooddriver
Summary: After a murder on their college campus, Chloe finds herself reluctantly leading an investigation with the infuriating and mysterious boy from her criminology class.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 19
Kudos: 93





	1. Part One

It was 8am on Tuesday. Anyone bilious enough to be arguing with a professor at 8am on a Tuesday was not someone Chloe wanted to be around, and yet here she was, leaning away from the boy who had sat next to her on the first day of class as he now stared down their professor. She’d slipped into the classroom only a minute before class started and taken a seat in the back. She was hoping to make it through at least a day without being recognized by any of her classmates. The seat to her right was empty—thank God because she would be well into their personal space if someone had been there—but to her left sat a tall boy who had slipped in even later than her.  
He was an easy person to peg. He was well dressed—again, it was way too early for someone like this—in black jeans, dress shoes, and a fitted blue button up. He brought only a laptop with him—no backpack, no paper or pencil. And he’d sat in the aisle seat probably intentionally so he could stretch his long legs out into the aisle, crossed at the ankles. She was thinking family money, frat boy, a blonde girlfriend he cheats on like it’s his religion. Chloe probably would have found him attractive if she had a little less sense. Thankfully, he proved himself to be insufferable exactly three minutes into class.  
She was still recovering from the humiliation of the professor reading “Chloe Decker” off the roll sheet and half her peers turning to look at her in shock when the professor reached a name on the list that made him stumble. “L—ahem. Lucifer Samael Morningstar?”  
The boy next to her looked up from his laptop screen, smiling. “Here.” He had a British accent—fuck.  
The professor blinked at him for a moment. “Do you prefer your—um—middle name? Samael?”  
Lucifer Samael Morningstar tilted his head to the side, and his smile twisted into a smirk. “No, I prefer to be called my God-given name, actually. Lucifer. Or Mr. Morningstar works too, professor.”  
A few of their classmates chuckled. They had turned back around in Chloe’s direction again, but this time to gape at the boy named after the devil. Chloe nursed the hope that he would be the spectacle this quarter—he certainly seemed to bask in the attention. He caught the gaze of a girl staring and winked. She blushed and whipped back around to face the professor.  
“Right, of course,” the professor agreed. He cleared his throat. “Alright—ahem—Melissa Oliver?”  
Lucifer cracked his neck and somehow stretched his legs out even farther into the aisle. Abruptly, he turned to look at Chloe. “Why do you look familiar?” he questioned. He looked her up and down studiously then met her eyes. “Have we had sex?”  
Chloe scoffed and he looked taken aback. She realized he was actually asking if they had hooked up. Jesus. “Uh, no.” She tried to look back to the front of the classroom but found herself drawn back to him as he refused to look away. “Seriously. I have no idea who you are. We haven’t had sex.” Although you’ve probably seen all my goods anyway.  
“Hm. I could swear I’ve seen you naked. Would you like to?”  
“No!” Chloe hissed.  
Lucifer stuck out his hand. “Strange. I’m Lucifer Morningstar, in case you missed all that commotion.”  
Chloe shook his hand and said, “I’m Chloe.”  
“Chloe,” Lucifer repeated, like he was trying her name out for size. “Wait. Are you—”  
“Class is starting.” Chloe finally snapped her gaze away from him and leaned on her hand in a way that blocked her face from Lucifer’s gaze. She pretended to be so thoroughly engrossed in the professor’s description of the syllabus that she didn’t hear it when Lucifer chuckled quietly.  
~.~  
It took Chloe a week into the quarter to burn out on dining hall food, and she made her way to the grocery store after Criminology—during which she had spent the whole time aggressively ignoring Lucifer’s presence one seat away. She had to be back on campus for Statistics later, so she went to the Save Mart down the road instead of the Sprouts she generally frequented. Pretending not to notice the group of teenage boys not-so-subtly shadowing her around the store, Chloe picked up some healthy-ish snacks as well as some microwave meals.  
As she approached the checkout, she paused to look at the candy selection. She reached for a pack of reese’s cups and caught sight of the magazine rack above it. A picture of herself trecking across campus was blown up on the cover of Star Magazine. “Hot Tub College? Chloe Decker returns for winter quarter at Los Angeles College. Sources say she is not planning to return for the sequel of the movie that made her famous.”  
Chloe scoffed and turned away. She used to buy every one of those trashy magazines and pour over them, obsessing over the world’s opinion of her—but she had come to realize that she was much calmer when she just let it lie. There was no point to engaging with the paparazzi who heckled her or—worse—letting herself care what they published afterward.  
Still—she turned back around quickly and shoved People in front of the pictures of her. She grabbed her candy then looked at the pack of leering boys still hovering ten feet from her. She raised her eyebrows at them before finally rolling her cart into the checkout line.  
She missed Sprouts. Sprouts didn’t have magazines by the candy.  
She made her way back to her campus apartment slowly, driving carefully to avoid and chance of being pulled over and being photographed talking to the cops. That was the last thing she needed this close to the anniversary of her father’s death, which she was sure would bring a resurfacing of The Picture.  
After shoving her purchases into her mini-fridge and popping open a bag of pretzels, she swung her backpack over her shoulder. It was a nice day—probably one of the last until spring—so she figured she would take advantage of it by studying in the quad until Stats.  
She’d managed to work herself into a better mood by the time she walked down there, but it was promptly ruined when she laid out her jacket and sat down on the grass, only to hear Lucifer’s distinctive low laugh. She turned to see him spread out on a blanket a few yards away, a skinny blond tucked into his side with her head in his chest. She was saying something too quietly for Chloe to hear, but whatever it was made Lucifer’s eyes light up and he smiled down at her mischievously. “My my,” he chuckled.  
Ugh gross. Chloe turned so he wouldn’t be able to see her face and reached into her backpack for her headphones. She didn’t want him to know she’d seen him and getting up to move would be too obvious at this point.  
Chloe sensed someone walk past her to approach Lucifer, and she didn’t have enough restraint to stop herself from turning to look. Another pretty blonde. She caught Lucifer’s attention, and he said, “Hey!” excitedly, then jokingly, “Sorry, do I know you?” He said something to the girl he was with, who kissed him roughly in response then stood, grabbed her backpack, and walked away. The new girl sat down beside him and leaned into him closely.  
Chloe could swear she knew that girl from somewhere. After a few sneaky sidelong glances as she put in her earbuds but didn’t turn any music on, she realized that it was a girl named Delilah. Delilah had been semi-Instagram famous for a while before getting recently signed by a modeling agency and appearing on every billboard overnight. That, combined with her position as captain of the cheerleading team, made her a well-known name around campus.  
Of course, she would be friends with Lucifer. Judging by the way Lucifer pulled her close to him and stroked her cheek while they spoke, they were a little more than friends.  
Chloe stared stubbornly down at her textbook, not absorbing any information as she tried not to be curious about their interaction. They talked for a while before they stood and hugged. Lucifer wrapped his body around hers protectively and held on longer than Chloe expected. Eventually, he let go of her and she kissed him on the cheek before walking away.  
Chloe watched Lucifer watch her walk away, a small smile on his face and his hands stuck in the pockets of his tight jeans.  
A loud cracking sound made Chloe jump and look around. She did a quick pan of the people around, all of whom were also snapping to attention. Her eyes made it back to Lucifer just as another harsh crack sounded. She watched his face change from confusion to horror, and he took off running. She followed his direction and realized that Delilah was on the ground not far from them.  
Lucifer landed on his knees next to her. “Delilah,” he said, sounding confused. She didn’t move, and as he touched along her body in concern, his hands became covered in blood.  
As the people around started to realize that the sounds had been shots fired, the quad turned into a sea of people running toward the closest buildings. Chloe heard sirens in the distance and turned in the direction they were coming from, only to whip her head back around when Lucifer took off into a sprint again. He was headed toward the only person running toward the other end of the quad. The stranger caught his foot on a tree root and stumbled, barely catching himself before hitting the ground. As he regained his footing, Lucifer caught up and shoved him to the ground, going down with him. He pushed his face down into the dirt with one hand and reached into the man’s waistband, pulling out a gun and tossing it to the side. The cop’s daughter inside of Chloe panicked about if the safety was on.  
Chloe knew she should run--people were still rushing past her, narrowly avoiding running into her half the time—but she couldn’t take her eyes off of her classmate. He punched the shooter once in the face before leaning in close to talk to him. What Chloe would give to hear the conversation they were having.  
Despite her better instincts, Chloe stood and walked slowly over to Delilah. Her eyes were open. There was no doubt in Chloe’s mind that she was dead already. Chloe’s stomach dropped as the reality of the situation set in. Delilah was dead. Lucifer was currently manhandling a murderer. She gulped and looked across the grass just in time to see several police cars pull up with their lights flashing.  
Lucifer had to be shouted at to put his hands up, which he did way too slowly for Chloe’s comfort. She couldn’t hear over the sounds of the sirens, but she saw him flick his hand to point out the gun, which an officer jogged to retrieve.  
Chloe’s attention was pulled by a hand on her shoulder. She jerked away from it and looked up to see an officer looking at her with concern. Paramedics were approaching and swarmed Delilah. Chloe was gently guided away by the officer, who said quietly, “Let’s go find somewhere to sit so I can get some information from you, okay? Are you hurt?”  
She shook her head jerkily. “No. No, I’m not hurt. Where’s—” She searched for Lucifer and saw that he too had an officer putting their hand on his shoulder. He shoved it off of him.  
“It’s okay,” The officer with Chloe consoled her. “They’ve arrested the shooter. I just need to ask you some questions while we figure out what happened.”  
The sound of more gunshots caused both Chloe and the officer to jump. She looked frantically around and saw that the cops on the other side of the quad all had their guns drawn. The shooter was on the ground, and Chloe thought she could see blood. Not far away, Lucifer frantically tried to pull his arm out of the hand of a police officer.  
After a few beats, the officer next to her said slowly, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here. Okay?” Chloe allowed herself to be led away.  
~.~  
School was cancelled for the remainder of the week. Chloe spent the entire time obsessively watching the news. The shooter had been a guy named Jeff Damon. Upon being apprehended by the cops, he’d pretended to reach into his jacket for a gun and been shot to death by officers.  
To Chloe’s surprise, Lucifer’s name never came up in the news.  
When Tuesday rolled around again, Chloe expected him to be absent from class. Even she had barely managed to pull herself together for it. To her shock, the door opened exactly one minute before class was to begin, and Lucifer strode in, impeccably dressed and chin held high. He folded into his chair gracefully. He didn’t greet her, and Chloe wasn’t sure how to be the one to initiate conversation with him.  
Eventually the professor started lecturing, and Chloe focused on taking notes. It was then that Lucifer quietly said, “The police say you stayed with Delilah. Are you… okay?”  
Chloe stopped writing. She turned to look at him slowly, and he was already staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay, I think. Shaken up but… What about you? Are you holding up alright, that must’ve been—”  
“Fine,” he cut her off, his voice rising in pitch and his eyebrows shooting up. “I’m fine.” Then he pressed his lips together in a mockery of a smile and stared resolutely at his computer, signaling that their conversation was over.  
“Alright,” Dr. Stevens sighed. He plugged his computer into the HDMI cable and turned around to watch his display pop up on the projector. He was showing them a word document: “Unsolved: The Assignment”. “First off, I want to thank everyone for being here today. I know that recent events have left everyone feeling unsettled, so I appreciate seeing all your bright faces this morning.”  
Chloe snuck a glance at Lucifer from the side of her eyes. His face remained blank.  
“Now,” Dr. Stevens continued, “today I’m assigning a pretty large project that will be due the last week of class. This, the midterm, and the final will be the entirety of your grade so pay attention.” He went on the explain that they would each need to pick an unsolved mystery—famous or otherwise, murder or otherwise—and present a case. They should present a well-researched background, multiple possibilities, and a supported theory that they argued for. Overall, it was the exact shit that got criminology majors going. “I’m going to assign partners, so stop looking at your friends like that.” He grabbed a sheet of paper and started listing off pairs of names.  
“Oliver, you’re with Williams. Ahmed, you’re with Jones.” He rambled off a few more, while Chloe tried to figure out a pattern to how he had decided it. It seemed mostly random. She ground her teeth, praying to God that she didn’t get paired with some meathead who would just spend their study time eye fucking her.  
“Decker, you’re with Morningstar.”  
Fuck.  
Lucifer turned to look at her, grinning. He saw her grimace and his smile widened. “I think we’re going to do some great work together, Chloe.” He was leering at this point.  
Chloe rolled her eyes.  
“We should probably exchange numbers.” He was having way too much fun with this. “Ya know, just in case we need to discuss… the project.”  
“Yeah, alright.” Chloe pulled out her phone from her back pocket and pulled up her contacts. She handed it to Lucifer.  
He took it with just his pointer finger and thumb. He looked deep in concentration as he typed in his number for her before handing it back. In the company field, he had typed: Future Sexual Partner. When she glared up at him, he gave her another shit eating grin.  
“Not funny,” Chloe muttered. She sent him a blank text. “That’s me, so you have my number.”  
“Finally.”  
Chloe realized she was clenching her jaw and forced her face to relax. “Can you stop?” she bit out. She looked up from her phone. Lucifer looked taken aback, his head drawn back as he looked at her with wide eyes. “I just want to do well on this project, and I really don’t have the patience for all this.” She waved her hand around him vaguely.  
He opened his mouth a few times. “I see,” he said slowly. “Well then.” He cleared his throat and looked down, pulling down the cuffs of his sleeves.  
Chloe shook her head. “You’re acting like you’ve never been turned down before. Is the concept of a woman who cares more about her academic career than getting in your pants that novel?”  
She had meant it as a hypothetical question, but he immediately responded, “It is. You’re an anomaly.” The way he looked her up and down, his eyes desperately searching for some answer on her face, told her that he actually meant that.  
“You should probably get used to being turned down, buddy.”  
Dr. Stevens moved on to the lecture for the day, and Lucifer didn’t have time to respond. In her peripheral vision, Chloe could see him shaking his head minutely. What a weirdo.  
.~.  
After class, Lucifer took off immediately, pushing out of the classroom gracefully and disappearing down the sidewalk before Chloe had even packed up her bag. She shoved in her papers haphazardly and ran to catch up with him. She shouted his name and fell into step beside him. He looked startled by her appearance and stopped walking. “What can I do for you, Chloe?” he asked. He wasn’t beaming with a grin like usual. In fact, he looked a little unsure.  
Chloe frowned. “As insufferable as I find you, we do actually need to work together on this project.”  
His face lit up. Jesus Christ. “Perfect because I’ve already picked our case.” He stepped off the sidewalk, out of the way of the waves of people rushing between classes.  
“What? Without asking me?” She huffed, and he tilted his head. “Well what is it?”  
“Well Delilah’s murder, of course.”  
Chloe thought she’d misheard him for a second. She tried not to think about the vivid memory of Lucifer sprinting across the quad, his hands bloodstained. The expression on his face was inappropriately enthused while he waited for her response.  
Chloe shook her head. “Lucifer, that’s not... a mystery. The man who killed her is dead. You caught him. I watched you. Case closed.”  
Lucifer shook his head. “Oh no, you misunderstand. That man merely pulled the trigger. Someone else is responsible for Delilah’s death. I intend to find out who.”  
Chloe gaped at him. He said it with such finality that it seemed he really expected her to be on board with it. “Lucifer, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”  
He frowned. “Getting justice for a murdered young woman isn’t a good idea?”  
“No, it’s not that.” Chloe huffed and adjusted her backpack on her shoulder. She dropped her voice. “I just think, in this case, it’s probably more appropriately left up to the police to handle than two college students.”  
Lucifer rolled his eyes. “That corrupt little organization called the LAPD? Please. They’ve already called it a shut case, despite my best efforts.”  
Chloe noticed the way his jaw clenched minutely. It was a stark contrast to the casual, annoyed expression on the rest of his face. If she hadn’t caught it, it would have seemed that he almost cared more about the LAPD’s perceived incompetence than the death of his friend—but that little twitch in his jaw gave away the hurt he was trying to resolve. Chloe reminded herself to empathize, even if he was a creepy asshole.  
“I’m sorry. I just really don’t think a case this recent or personal is appropriate for our final project, Lucifer.” His face didn’t change, so she continued. “Do you have a class after this one on Thursday? We can plan to go over to the library and pick out a case together. One we’ll both enjoy doing, okay?”  
He looked at her for just long enough that she started to fidget under his gaze. “Alright. Thursday.”  
~.~  
On Thursday morning, for the first time that quarter, Chloe actually got out of bed when her first alarm went off. She tried to tell herself that it was because she had slept well and not because she wanted the extra time to do her hair before class.  
Her roommate, Ella, woke up as Chloe was finishing up getting ready. “You like nice,” she remarked as she rolled over in bed and threw off her covers. “Something happening today?”  
Chloe sputtered, “No, just woke up a little early today so I decided to do my makeup.” She cleared her throat and started slicking her hair back into her ponytail.  
“Nice, nice, gotta dress for success,” Ella encouraged.  
She got out of bed and started telling Chloe, unprompted, about the lab practical she had today that she was nervous for. She was a forensic science major, and always ended up setting the curves on all her tests. Chloe jumped in with “yeah?”s and “mhm”s where appropriate, pretending that Ella’s nerves were at all founded.  
When it was time to leave, Chloe said goodbye and headed out the door. As it shut, Ella yelled out to her, “I hope whoever he is, he appreciates the look!”  
When Chloe got to class, Lucifer was surprisingly already there. He wore his usual theme—black jeans, shiny shoes, button up shirt. He looked up when Chloe came in. “Aha,” he greeted, “There’s no getting out of this now.”  
Chloe shook her head. “Get out of what?”  
“Hanging out with me.”  
“We’re not hanging out. We’re gonna work on our project.”  
He wobbled his head. “Hm. Tomato, tomahto.”  
Chloe peeked at his computer screen. He seemed to be taking a break from his constant online shopping, and instead had a news website open. She frowned, seeing that his mouse was hovering over a headline about Delilah. “Los Angeles College Mourns the Loss of a Student,” it read. He hadn’t clicked it on it, which somehow was sadder.  
Did he have other friends? What about that hot blonde who had been hanging all over him right before Delilah’s death? God—was this guy so desperate for companionship now that he really wanted to hang out with Chloe? Chloe stopped that line of thinking immediately. Just because he had lost a friend didn’t mean he wasn’t also an asshole. She wasn’t going to write off his leering just because she felt bad for him.  
Her phone buzzed, and she opened up a text from Ella. “Hey,” it read, “just got to class and realized I left my keycard in the room. Can you meet me there after your class and let me in?” Chloe responded telling her that she would.  
When class ended, Lucifer looked at her expectantly. “Do I at least get the honor of walking to the library with you? Or is that too companionable? Shall I meet you there?”  
Chloe rolled her eyes. “Let’s walk over together. I have to stop at my dorm though—it’s on the way.”  
He held the door for her on the way out, already chatting about how dreadful his trek to campus had been this morning. Chloe only half listened, but gathered that he has woken up hungover this morning and then nearly been hit by a car while he dashed to campus. “You live off campus?” she interjected.  
He perked up, realizing that she was actually paying attention. “About a mile off campus, yeah. Maze and I live with some other people in a house.”  
“Maze?”  
“An old friend.” He smirked.  
She nodded slowly. They reached her dorm building and she looked around for Ella, who she found leaning on a bike rack. Chloe swiped them all into the building and hustled up the stairs. Lucifer followed casually while Ella thanked her over and over. “I don’t know where my head was at this morning,” she said airily.  
“How’d your test go?” Chloe asked, knowing exactly where Ella’s head had been at that morning.  
“Oh, it was so easy. I way over-studied.”  
Chloe unlocked their room. “There ya go.” She said goodbye to Ella and led Lucifer back toward the exit.  
He started talking about how living in the dorms must make access to sexual partners so easy. “Then again,” he added, “there is the issue of a roommate. Though they don’t necessarily have to be a problem, if they’re game to jump in. I’m never opposed to someone joining the fun.”  
Chloe huffed and rolled her eyes. She considered stopping to grab a coffee before they reached the library, but decided she didn’t want to elongate her time with him any longer. Lucifer looked down at her. “What? Don’t act all prudish. I watched your movie.” He waggled his eyebrows.  
“That was a movie,” she bit out. What she would give to be able to go back in time and stop herself from doing that movie. Just knowing that douchebags like Lucifer everywhere had seen her naked was enough to keep her up at night, and he was treating it like a joke. She was never going to be taken seriously again.  
He seemed to catch onto the bite in her words and didn’t argue. They reached the doors of the library in silence, and she didn’t wait for his input before leading them to her favorite spot in the back of the third floor. She sat down and pulled out her laptop, not looking at him. She sensed him slide into the seat across from her. He didn’t pull out any supplies.  
“So,” he said, after she didn’t look up from her laptop screen for a few moments, “I suppose you aren’t in the mood to hear my argument about why we should investigate Delilah’s death?”  
“Not at all. Did you put any sort of effort into looking up some cases you would want to do?” Chloe created a Google Sheet titled Unsolved Project.  
“Not at all,” he responded. He put his elbow on the table and leaned his head on his hand. “I’m thinking something sexy--torrid affair gone wrong? None of that depressing missing children nonsense.” Okay, that was something at least. That narrowed down the pool and could actually help Chloe pick one out, since he obviously wasn’t going to do it.  
She said, “Weird field to be going into if you can’t handle a missing child case.”  
“I can handle it,” he defended, rolling his eyes. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked it. Chloe caught herself looking at the veins bulging out of the hand holding it. “Besides, I’m not a criminology major. This is part of my general curriculum.”  
That explained a lot. “What major are you?” she asked. If he said business, she was going to lose her mind.  
“Business.”  
“Typical,” Chloe breathed out, and Lucifer laughed.  
“I’ll have you know, I actually have grand plans with this degree,” he said. He leaned back in his chair. “It’s a respectable major sullied by frat boys with daddy’s money too dumb to study anything else. It’s wasted on them really.”  
“Oh--so you’re different?” she teased. “Frat boy with daddy’s money who’s actually a little bit smart then? Naturally, you plan on taking over the family business and calling yourself self-made?”  
Lucifer smiled at her, and there was actually genuine amusement in it.  
“Well, I’m not in a fraternity, to start,” he said, studying her. “And if I ever see any of daddy’s money, Hell will surely have frozen over.”  
Working theory: Grew up with money, problem child, basks in the family dysfunction he caused to seem troubled and deep.  
Deciding not to feed into the mysteriousness he was clearly trying to exude, she said, “I’m gonna share this sheet with you. What’s your school email?”  
“Lucifer S Morningstar at LA college dot com.”  
She typed it in, and his contact popped up. A part of her that hadn’t really believed it was his real name was shocked. “How often do you get the ‘Is that actually your name’ question?”  
Lucifer shrugged. “Basically every time I meet someone. Most people get used to it a lot faster than you seem to be though.” He raised an eyebrow at her, and Chloe was humble enough to feel embarrassed. She realized that his name hadn’t been factoring into her theories nearly enough.  
“I’m just—” Chloe paused to choose her next words carefully. “—curious what would… compel someone to name their child after…”  
“The devil?” Lucifer mercifully finished for her. He breathed out heavily and sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers and crossing his legs. He seemed to also be strategizing his words.  
Unable to wait, she pushed, “Are they—like—Satanists?” Or just plain crazy? Addicts, assholes, any number of things that could fuck up a child enough that they ended up like Lucifer.  
Lucifer chuckled and his jaw tensed. His eyes darkened in a way she hadn’t seen before. “Quite the opposite, actually. They’re very devout Christians.”  
Chloe had never heard the word “devout” sound like an insult before. She chewed at her lip, debating how to respond. Before she could, Lucifer tilted his head and said, “What would compel a legacy movie star to go to school to major in criminal justice?”  
It was her turn to sigh and sit back. She pulled a hair tie off her wrist to fiddle with. “My dad was a cop.” She waited for him to remember some trashy paparazzi article he must’ve read about it. Maybe the picture. When she glanced up though, he was watching her patiently, expecting more. “He died a year ago. He was shot while on duty.”  
“Ah.” Lucifer cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”  
Chloe swallowed the lump that had formed at the thought of her father. She shook her head. “I guess I’m hoping he would be proud of me, which is why we should work on this project.”  
Lucifer chuckled. “Alright, alright. Give me that.” He snatched the list she’d brought out of her hand and leaned over it on the table. “Boring. Boring. Boring. Honestly, Chloe.” He slid the paper back over to her. “You know what would really make dear old Dad proud?” The right side of his mouth lifted and his eyes gleamed. “Solving a case that’s actually ongoing.”  
“No.”  
He huffed and looked up at the ceiling. Chloe caught herself staring at his jawline and studied her list. “You honestly don’t trust that the cops got the right guy? You tackled him yourself.”  
Lucifer scoffed. Continuing to stare up, he replied, “He was paid to kill her. He told me himself. Someone else is responsible for her death and they’re getting away with it. It’s not right.” When he finally looked back at her, he looked pained.  
“Why do you care so much?” Chloe asked before she could stop herself. “Were you that close?”  
Lucifer wobbled his hand. “In a way.”  
“You slept together?”  
“Well, obviously. Everyone wants to sleep with me.”  
“I don’t.”  
“Come on, Chloe.” A wolf’s grin.  
“You’re avoiding answering me.”  
He laughed, a real laugh for once, and rolled his eyes. “Well you’ve got the interrogation part of being a cop down already, Detective.” He waited for the jab to affect her, and when her face didn’t change, he finally said, “Let’s just say I helped her get where she was in life, and my fear is that maybe it’s where she got in life that got her killed.”  
Chloe held his eyes for a moment, processing what he had said. “You need to prove to yourself that you’re not to blame for her death?”  
“No. I need to make sure she gets justice. I’ll dish it out myself if I have to.”  
“An eye for an eye?” Chloe prodded. “Very old testament of you, Lucifer.”  
“Perhaps it’s what I was made to do.” The fiery look in his eyes as he said it made Chloe shiver.  
“I have to go,” Chloe blurted out. She shoved her list of cases back at him and he snatched it up. “Pick one before we meet again, okay?” As she pulled her backpack on, she fumbled out, “And really, I’m sorry about your friend.”  
Lucifer waved his hand weakly and refused to look at her. “Right. Thanks.”  
.~.  
Later that night, Chloe rubbed her eyes and closed her laptop. She jumped as her phone started to vibrate on her desk. She reached for it slowly, assuming it was a spam call. When she saw the number, she quickly answered the call. “Hello?”  
“Hey, Chloe,” the voice on the other end greeted. “This a good time, kiddo?”  
Chloe’s chest warmed. Hearing Officer Clark’s voice reminded her of all the days spent following her dad around the station when he went in “just to pick up some paperwork” on his days off. Officer Clark would sneak her bits of donut then play innocent when her father wondered how she got so hyper.  
“Yes, please, distract me from studying for my policy class.” She pushed aside her laptop and reached for a pad of paper.  
Clark chuckled. “Alright. I looked into the guy whose name you sent me. Surprise, surprise--there was only one person with that name. I’ve got some info for you but not much.”  
Of course. “Let’s hear it.”  
“Well looks like he’s got dual citizenship here & the UK. American mother, Charlotte Morningstar; and Welsh father, Neil Morningstar. Dad’s a pastor at a church up in Oregon; looks like he even got into some televangelism.” That tracked with the devout Christian family thing, but took it even further than Chloe had been expecting. The idea of Lucifer being a pastor’s son was so absurd it was funny. “The name Lucifer is on all his records from what I can see, so it really is the name his parents gave him.” Chloe had been expecting that, but it still managed to make her grimace. “He was born in Oregon but spent most of his younger years at school in Wales. I think he did his high school in the US though, at some boarding school.”  
“Where’d he go to high school?” Chloe interrupted. She carried her notepad into the kitchen—the memory of donuts had made her hungry.  
“Uhhh.” Papers rustled. “California Academy of Christ up in NorCal—looks like Humboldt area.”  
Chloe pulled a bagel out of the cabinet, pulled the two halves apart, and stuck them in the toaster. “Interesting.”  
“Doesn’t look like he graduated though. He got his GED when he was eighteen. Worked at a high end club called Lux for a while here in LA. Started there at school at the same time as you.”  
“Did his entire family move down here or just him?” Chloe asked, tapping her fingers on the counter.  
Clark hmed. “From what I can tell, just him.”  
“What was the name of that school?”  
“California Academy of Christ. So, what—are you dating this boy?”  
Chloe laughed, jotting down the name. “God, no. I got stuck working on a project with him and he’s infuriating.”  
“Oh yeah?” She could hear the smile in Clark’s voice. “So why the curiosity?”  
“Have you ever known me to leave a mystery unsolved?”  
After giving Clark the summary of what had happened in her life since she last saw him, they said their goodbyes and she hung up. She started to type in the name of Lucifer’s high school when the toaster finished, making her jump. She really needed to get over the jumpiness that she’d adopted since Delilah’s death; her murderer was already dead.  
As it turned out from her googling, the California Academy of Christ was less of a high school and more of a four-year Jesus camp that gave out diplomas at the end. Their website promised to help troubled teens find their way back to Christ and improve their lives with His love. Chloe caught herself laughing at the thought of Lucifer spending years at a place like that. He must’ve made their lives miserable.  
~.~  
The next morning in class, Chloe arrived after Lucifer. She climbed over his legs to sit next to him. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, Lucifer handed her the murder list. It had been folded three ways, probably to be stuck in his pocket. “I choose the obvious threesome gone wrong.”  
Chloe took it from him. “Christina Kettlewell?”  
He nodded. “Yes, that one.”  
She looked down at the paper in shock. She found it hard to believe that he had given in that easily. “Oh—okay.”  
“Yes, I suppose I’ll have to catch Delilah’s killer on my own,” he responded absently. He opened his laptop and pulled up a blank browser.  
“Don’t guilt me. It won’t work.” She chewed on her lip and made a quick decision. “Okay. I will spend one day helping you look into it.” Lucifer perked up, his ears rising with his grin. “But—you have to be honest with me the whole time, okay? About Delilah, about your whole weird shtick. I have questions.”  
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to get to know me, Chloe.” He looked so smug.  
She sighed, trying to fight back the smile that seeing his gleeful expression elicited. “I just like a good mystery, okay?”  
“Alright, alright, detective.”  
“Shut up.”  
Lucifer chuckled. Chloe hated how familiar of a sound it was becoming.  
.~.  
The next morning, Chloe woke up earlier than she needed to, hoping to get some work done before her policy class. She forced herself to get to the shower, still half asleep. When she returned to her room, her roommate had left. Wrapped in a towel, she reached into the closet for her hamper so she could wear the same jeans she’d taken off the night before.  
“Hello, Detective Decker.”  
Chloe jumped, yelping at the sudden greeting. She stumbled back from her closet, whipping around to look at the door. The sudden motion disrupted the towel, and it fell to the floor.  
Lucifer stood in the doorway, grinning. When her towel hit the floor, his eyebrows shot up. “Good morning to you too.”  
“Lucifer!” She dove to pick it back up, holding it in front of her. “How did you get in here?” Her face burned, and she looked everywhere but at his face. It occurred to her that it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, and the thought made her blush even more.  
“Door was propped open,” he said innocently. He blinked at her a few times then held up a white paper bag. “I’ve brought you breakfast. We have something to discuss.”  
“Lucifer, get out! I’m naked!” Chloe looked desperately around for clothes to throw on.  
“I’ll be quick.”  
He held the bag out closer to her, and she humored him by taking one hand off her towel to grab it. She peeked in—a breakfast sandwich and a juice. “What could possibly be so important that you broke into my dorm this early in the morning?”  
He waved his hand exasperatedly. “The door was open.” He waited for her response, but when she didn’t engage with his argument, he followed up, “There’s a party tonight, and I’d like you to come with me.”  
Chloe blinked. “What?”  
“Delilah’s useless boyfriend will be there. I’m calling in my one day of help.”  
“Seriously?” He couldn’t have just texted her this?  
He misunderstood her confusion. “Well he knows who I am, and he doesn’t like me much. I need you to get information out of him. Our deal still stands of course.”  
“O—okay. Okay, fine. Just text me where and when to meet you, psycho,” Chloe agreed. “Now, please get out so I can get dressed.”  
.~.  
Lucifer eventually texted her “7:30pm-ish. My house. We’ll Uber from there” followed by his address.  
So at 7:33, Chloe walked carefully across the dead grass to his front door. She took in the house in front of her. It looked like most other houses occupied by college students in the area; It was probably a nice house at one time, but the neglect from its residents had left it looking pathetic and rundown.  
She stopped at the porch. She had texted him that she was on her way and he’d responded, “Door’s unlocked. Come on in. No roommates around.” She shoved down her surprising nervousness. God—she should have pre-gamed this. The thought of Lucifer was already making her tense, and she hadn’t even walked in yet.  
She took a deep breath and opened the front door. “Lucifer?” she called out. “Sorry, I’m a little late.”  
“Ah, Chloe!” he responded from another room. “Not to worry! Come on in.”  
She followed his voice around the corner and saw him standing in the living room—naked. She turned around quickly, gasping. “Oh my God, Lucifer! What are you doing?” She tried to forget the image of his penis before it was permanently burned into her brain.  
“I thought you deserved a little tit for tat. For this morning,” he explained, as if that made it any better.  
Chloe looked around desperately and picked up a blanket draped on the couch. She turned around just long enough to toss it to him. “Lucifer, have you never heard of Title IX?” She made a conscious effort to keep herself from yelling. “Put some fucking clothes on. Jesus.” She sensed him wrapping the blanket around his lower half and turned to look at him again.  
“Seriously, Darling?” he questioned. He looked at her in disbelief, tucking the end of the blanket into itself. “You don’t want any of this? I mean, look at me.”  
Oh, she was. She choked back the feeling that his defined chest brought out in her.  
Still trying to win her over, he put out his arms and started a slow turn. Chloe rolled her eyes and tried not to watch too intently. When he’d made it nearly 180 degrees, Chloe’s stomach froze. Where she’d been expecting to see the definition of back muscles there were instead two huge scars. They were identical, on either side of his spine--each at least a foot long and several inches wide. She couldn’t decide if they looked like a burn or a slice.  
Unaware of her horror, Lucifer continued his show. “You can’t argue with that, can you?” he gloated, finally turning back to look at her face.  
“Lucifer, what,” she choked out. She motioned toward her own back. “What happened to your—”  
“Oh.” He frowned. “That. Nothing for you to worry about,” he said, talking quickly, stumbling over the words. “A boring story really, not exactly party talk.”  
“No. Seriously.” Chloe approached him, softly grabbing his shoulder to turn him back around. She reached out to feel one of the scars, trying to deduce what injury could have caused such awful scarring. Before she could make contact, he whipped back around, grabbing the offending wrist roughly. He stared her down. “Don’t,” he said, “please,” and she couldn’t tell if he was commanding or begging.  
Chloe looked up at him speechless. A million questions circled her mind, and she couldn’t decide where to start. Before she could form any coherent thoughts or words, Lucifer let go of her wrist and started to walk away. “We should get going,” he said jovially. “I’m hoping to catch Delilah’s stain in the happy place between tipsy and too drunk to be helpful.” He disappeared into his bedroom.  
Chloe stayed where she was. “So—uh—this party?” she forced out shakily. She could hear him rifling through his closet, probably for some douchey button up.  
“It’s a sorority exchange with the basketball team. Delilah’s stupid boyfriend, Vilhelm, is on the team—thinks he’s God’s gift because he’s a starter. His friends call him 2Vile.” Lucifer emerged (wearing a douchey button up) and smiled at her as if he hadn’t just grabbed her wrist hard enough that she would have bruises in the morning. “Now. Care for a pre-game shot?”  
~.~  
When they approached the front door of the sorority, Lucifer stepped in front of Chloe and greeted the girls standing at the front door with open arms. A tall guy standing with them puffed up and stepped forward. “Are you on the list?” he asked.  
Lucifer cocked his head. “Ah, no.”  
Chloe rolled her eyes. Of course, he was the kind of guy to roll up to a closed party without being on the list. In approximately thirty seconds they would be headed back the way they came.  
One of the girls pushed past their bodyguard. “Oh stop.” She smiled sweetly up at Lucifer, ignoring Chloe’s presence. “I know him.” And the eyes she gave him told Chloe that she really did know him. “Go on in, Luce. Maybe find me later?”  
“We’ll see how the night goes, Darling,” he said softly and pecked her on the cheek. He turned to beckon Chloe forward and pushed her ahead of him into the house.  
Immediately past the doorway, the air was heavy and warm. The swarm of people was packed up to the walls, rubbing on each other like Chloe had avoided doing since coming to college. It occurred to her suddenly how many smartphones were in the room, and how many of these broke college kids could benefit from selling a picture of her here to the tabloids. She looked uncertainly up at Lucifer.  
He leaned forward to speak into her ear. “See the loser with the wife beater on? Bit on the nose but--” He motioned to a guy who was standing on the back of the couch and cheering on a smaller boy doing a keg stand. He faltered a little and some beer splashed out of his cup. Chloe nodded. “That is 2Vile.”  
She shot a look up at Lucifer. She scrunched up her nose, and he laughed.  
He set a hand on her shoulder. “He’s a simple man. All you really have to do is have a pretty face and he’ll say anything. Try to give him a glimmer of hope he’ll get to sleep with you.”  
“Lucifer!”  
He held up his hands, still grinning. “Shall I get you a drink to mask the pain of talking to him?”  
Chloe shook her head. She knew this kind of guy, and she needed to have all her wits about her to deal with him. The last thing she wanted was to do anything that he could twist in his mind to think he had a chance with her. Just as she was about to respond, Lucifer grabbed her arm and ducked them both out of the room. He put his back against the wall and pulled her toward his side, almost instinctively. She stepped away from him.  
“He nearly saw me—can’t know I’m here. We had a bit of a tussle a few months back.”  
“Fighting over Delilah?”  
“Kind of.” Lucifer looked over her shoulder. He caught her annoyed expression and elaborated, “Delilah came over to my house with a black eye one night. I… spoke to him about it. And then of course she got back together with him a few weeks later.” He sighed.  
Chloe shoved down the little bit of her that wanted to like Lucifer after hearing that. The creepy hitting on her and beating up an abuser didn’t compute together in her image of him. Still—she snuck a glance around the doorframe at 2Vile, who was aiming a beer pong ball down a girl’s shirt—there were worse kinds of guys.  
“So… what?” Chloe asked, “I just go start talking to him?”  
Lucifer shrugged. “You’re the detective here. See if it seems like he had anything to do with it. Or if there’s anyone else who might know anything.”  
“That’s vague.”  
“I’m just a lowly business major. Sorry.” Lucifer grinned at her, and Chloe laughed.  
She took a long breath. Shelooked down at her clothes then pulled down the neck of her shirt until her cleavage was showing, and avoided looking up to see Lucifer’s reaction to that. “Alright. Here I go. If I get roofied out there, it’s on you.”  
He chuckled. “I assure you, that won’t be happening on my watch.”  
Chloe walked away without responding. She grabbed a random cup from the table and tried not to grip it too harshly. She casually strolled toward 2Vile and leaned against the wall a little bit away. She waited a few moments then looked over at him. “Oh my God, 2Vile?” She hated the sound of her voice like that.  
He looked over at her, first smiling then confused. He forced a grin. “Hey there! Sorry, I’m blanking on your name.”  
She grinned at him and walked closer. “Olivia,” she yelled. “Sorry, we met at that other party! Uh…” She pretended to be thinking.  
“Was it the football end of season?” he asked, his voice way higher than it needed to be to be heard over the music.  
“Yes!” She leaned forward and put a hand on his arm. “That was it!”  
“Oh yeah, I was totally blacked that night. Probably met a ton of people I forgot about.”  
“No worries. Definitely been there. So how have you been?” She pretended to suddenly be embarrassed and snapped her mouth shut. Quieter, she said, “Wait. Wasn’t your girlfriend that girl who got…” She stared down at her drink.  
“Nah, we were broken up,” he told her, too casually. “She was cheating on me. Still sucks though. She was cool. I can’t believe anyone would want to hurt her like that,” he said, like he hadn’t given her a black eye.  
“Oh my God, with who?” Who would ever be worth cheating on you with, she thought sarcastically.  
2Vile shrugged. “She didn’t have his real name on her phone, so I dunno. Not sure anyone knows but him.” Someone shouted his name and he turned his head. Across the room, another basketball player held up a shot glass. “In a minute, Jimmy Boy! Can't you see I’m talking to a lovely lady here?” He turned back to her. He shook his head. “Man, these benchwarmers party like they’re actually winning the games.”  
Chloe really had to tap into her valley girl energy to make the next question not sound like an interrogation. “No one knows who she was cheating with? She didn’t have—like—friends who might know. It must be killing you. I know I would be constantly wondering.”  
He shook his head. “She didn’t trust anyone.” His eyes were glazing over, and Chloe guessed he had smoked not long before she came over to talk to him. “It’s probably what destroyed our relationship,” he said somberly. It would’ve been more genuine coming from someone who wasn’t wrecked, or an abuser. “She went to see this peer counselor like twice a week. I swear she’s the only person Delilah told anything to.”  
“Here on campus? I didn’t know they had that.”  
“Yeah I told Delilah I’d get my dad to pay for a real therapist but she liked it. I dunno. She was always kind of weird.” He faltered. “I do miss her though,” he scrambled to say. “Like it’s super sad that she’s dead.”  
“Of course. Of course.” Chloe glanced over 2Vile’s shoulder and saw Lucifer watching her from the doorway, grinning. She pulled her attention back to 2Vile. “Ya know, I’m still really, like, broken up about the whole shooting thing. I think I could really benefit from something like that. Do you remember the counselor’s name?”  
2Vile took a long swig of his drink. He was now glancing over her shoulder and she turned quickly to see a group of basketball players clinking shot glasses together. “Uh… Linda something. Hey, you wanna go take a shot with me? You seem like a fireball girl?”  
Chloe smiled at him. “I’m actually here with someone. Thanks though!” She patted his arm and walked away without waiting for a response. Lucifer ducked back into the other room and she went to meet him.  
She found him leaning back on a sunken couch with two cups in his hand. He held one out to her. “Here. For the bad taste I’m sure that left in your mouth.”  
She took it from him and sniffed. Beer. It would do.  
“Delilah cheated on him so they were broken up when she died,” Chloe started. She took a sip of her drink and decided it was at least drinkable. “He doesn’t know who the other guy was but she’s been seeing a peer counselor on campus named Linda twice a week.”  
Lucifer tapped his cheek thoughtfully. “Interesting. That is certainly not what I expected.” He took a sip of his own drink. “We’ll have to find this Linda, of course.”  
Rather than point out that she had filled her obligation of one day of help, she decided to embark on her own detective work. She sat down next to Lucifer, trying not to think about how many bodily fluids were probably on the couch. “You come to these kinds of things a lot? It seems like you know everyone.” She scooted minutely closer.  
Lucifer shrugged. “I know how to party every once in a while. I work at a club downtown though, and the drinks and women there are much more favorable.” He looked down at her, stretching his arms out on the back of the couch. “I’ll take you sometime, if that sounds more your speed.”  
Chloe made eye contact with him and smiled. Surprisingly, he didn’t look at her with the predatory eyes she was used to seeing. The relaxation in his posture translated to his face as well. Was this his element? A trashy party full of drunk 18 year olds?  
“Maybe,” she responded. “I don’t really do this kind of stuff.”  
“Oh Chloe,” he chuckled. “You gotta loosen up. There’s lots of fun to be had in being bad.”  
Window of opportunity. “Alright. It’s Wednesday night, and I’m willing to go take some shots. That enough for you?”  
His eyes lit up, and he chugged down the last of his beer. “That’s a start.” He stood and put out a hand to her. She took it, allowing him to help her to her feet.  
He led her to a grouping of foldout tables. A group of girls were gathered around it. Behind the tables, a couple of tall guys hunched over cups and poured drinks. Chloe slowed her steps, unsure how to handle herself in this situation. Lucifer put a hand on her arm and pulled her forward.  
“Trevor!” Lucifer shouted.  
One of the pseudo-bartenders turned. “Ay! Lucifer in the house! What are you doing here, man? Which cheerleader is the lucky lady of the night?” He started pulling a clean cup off the stack.  
Lucifer approached the table. “More of a business matter tonight.”  
Trevor nodded slowly. “Alright. Well. Uh. I heard you were the one who got the guy who shot Del. Solid.”  
“I’m not one to let bad people get away with things.”  
“That’s for sure.” Trevor glanced in the direction of 2Vile but quickly looked back toward Lucifer. “What can I get you and your lady friend?” He nodded briefly toward Chloe, who he seemed to have just noticed, and she waved in response.  
Lucifer looked quickly down at her. “Vodka?”  
“Tequila,” she responded.  
“Okay, I see you,” he said, grinning. “We’ll each take a shot”—Chloe elbowed him—“a double shot of whatever tequila you have.”  
Trevor poured the shots into solo cups with a flourish, spilling only a little bit, and slid them across the table to Lucifer. Lucifer grabbed them and handed one to Chloe. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again,” he said, raising his cup toward Trevor.  
He turned on his heel to look down at Chloe. “To the best crime solving duo I’ve ever seen.”  
She tapped her cup against his and pretended to take the whole double shot. She swallowed only a bit of it then set the cup on the table behind her. Lucifer smoothly shot it all and let out an “ah”.  
Chloe batted her eyelashes at him. “Another?” She asked, doing the alcohol arithmetic in her head. A shot before they came, a beer, the double shot—she needed to get at least one or two more drinks into him to get him truly loosened up. Actually, it was probably more like two or three given how much he seemed to do things like this.  
He gave her a suspicious look, but didn’t say anything before turning back to Trevor to request two more shots of tequila. He handed her hers and took his unceremoniously. She took the whole shot this time.  
“So what do people do at these things?”  
Lucifer looked around. “Talk. Drink. Do drugs. Find people to hook up.” He put a hand on her back and stood next to her, gesturing forward. “Two down. Two to go.”  
“Oh my god, stop.” Chloe laughed, the alcohol warming her and putting her in a good mood. “I have no intention of doing any drugs or hooking up with anyone tonight.”  
Lucifer raised an eyebrow. “Anyone?”  
She shot him a look she hoped was admonishing.  
He pointed across the room to the glass sliding door. “Shall we go outside? It’s too hot and heavy in here for the prudish night we have planned.”  
He led her out to the backyard, where there were nearly as many people as inside. A beer pong table was being swarmed by people. Someone shouted “elbows!” and Chloe rolled her eyes.  
Lucifer led her past the crowd. Near the fence, cornhole boards were sitting neglected. He picked up the bags. “You know how to play?”  
“Oh, you have no idea the ass kicking you are in for, buddy.” Chloe snatched the red bags from him.  
“We’ll see about that.”  
Chloe’s first throw went straight into the hole. Lucifer’s landed on the corner of the board. That set the tone for an amazing game in which Chloe totally destroyed him. “Another drink for the victor?” she asked while he gaped at her.  
“Alright, alright.” He slinked away to recover from his loss and return with her prize.  
While Lucifer was gone, she pulled her phone from her pocket and tried not to look conspicuous. She must’ve failed miserably, because soon a boy at the beer pong table broke away to walk toward her. “Hey! You wanna come play? I need a partner.”  
Chloe looked up. He was smiling at her genuinely, and she got the feeling that he was actually trying to be nice and not creepy. “Oh, no, I’m good,” she stuttered out. The drinks were starting to hit her.  
The boy kept approaching. “I--uh--think you live on my floor. I’ve seen you around,” he said nervously. “Sequoia two?”  
“Oh my God, yeah!” Chloe perked up. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Chloe. 218.”  
“Grey. 222, so I guess we live pretty close.” He shook her hand, rubbing the back of his head with his other hand.  
Lucifer walked up behind Grey, both hands holding a cup. As he handed one to Chloe, he said, “Ah, Detective, I see you’ve made a new friend.” He looked Grey up and down suspiciously, standing uncomfortably close to him.  
Grey took a step back and smiled at Lucifer good-naturedly. “Hey, I know you. You were friends with Delilah, right? Lu...cca?”  
Lucifer took a second to look disgusted before responding. “Lucifer.”  
“Ah, yeah, I knew it was something weird like that.”  
“Weird?” Lucifer cocked his head, plastering a confused expression on his face that Chloe knew was not at all genuine. Grey, bless his heart, faltered and looked over at Chloe to save him.  
She decided that their investigation was more important than Lucifer’s attempts at a joke. “You knew Delilah too?”  
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Well--she was a cheerleader and 2Vile’s girlfriend, so she was kind of always around.” He looked down at his shoes, scuffing the front of one of them in the dead grass. “She was cool. It sucks that she’s dead,” he added sadly. “I still can’t believe she’s dead, really. I’m glad they shot the guy who did it honestly.”  
Lucifer looked like he was going to jump in and start spinning conspiracy about who really caused her death, so Chloe airily said, “Yeah. It seems like she was a really great person. Lucifer really cared about her.” She touched his arm lightly. He looked down at it, confused.  
“Right.” Grey was staring down again. He glanced up briefly at her hand on Lucifer’s arm. “Yeah. Anyway, I’ll leave you two to it. Nice to see you, man.” He put out his fist for Lucifer to bump. Lucifer, of course, stared at it without returning the gesture. Grey nodded awkwardly and walked back to the beer pong table.  
Lucifer rounded on Chloe. “I thought we weren’t hooking up with anyone tonight, Chloe.”  
“Shut up.” Chloe downed her drink and motioned for Lucifer to do the same. The way he stumbled a bit while he did told her that he was starting to really feel the alcohol. “I was trying to get more information from him.” She frowned, glancing back over to where Grey had disappeared into the crowd. “Both he and 2Vile said that it ‘sucks’ that Delilah is dead.”  
Lucifer shrugged. “I don’t think the basketball team is known for their wide vocabulary.”  
“Still, it’s a weird sentiment when someone you care about is dead.”  
“Oh, Chloe.” He slung an arm over her shoulder, causing both of them to sway until Chloe caught her balance. “You overestimate their intelligence, emotional or otherwise.”  
“Sometimes I think I overestimate your intelligence,” she quipped, putting one hand on the arm resting on her shoulder. She stretched her neck to look up at him. His face was reddening, and his hair had loosened up over the night. “I think you’re drunk, Mr. Morningstar.”  
He faked shock. “Me? Never.” He laughed to himself and then breathed out heavily. “I may be. I may have smoked a little while I was inside. I’m three for four.” He leered down at her, but she could see the joke in his eyes.  
“Well, there’s drunken cheerleaders galore. Go crazy.” She motioned to a girl who stumbled and ate the ground while being led out the back fence by her friend.  
“Too drunk to walk isn’t really my type.”  
“Oh, buddy, I think you need to take a look in the mirror before you say that right now.”  
He laughed loudly, finally pulling off of her. The rusted christmas lights strung across the fence reflected in his dark eyes, highlighting a genuine happiness in them that Chloe hadn’t found there before. She wondered if it was the party atmosphere that brought his joy out, or if he needed the weed and alcohol to get there.  
“Thank you for coming with me tonight, Chloe,” he said suddenly. “Your… help is very valuable to me.”  
“Your welcome,” she said in a low voice. “I’m actually kind of enjoying myself.”  
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, someone slammed open the sliding door and shouted, “Cops!” A sea of underclassmen surged to the gate. Instinctively, Chloe followed them.  
Lucifer reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Chloe. You’re twenty-one, are you not?”  
She gritted her teeth anxiously. She suddenly felt how cold out it was. “Yeah, but I really, really don’t need some pap getting a picture of me talking to the cops tonight.”  
He searched for something in her face for a second then replied, “Well we better get running then.” He took off into a sprint, and Chloe took a moment to react before racing after him. The brisk air of the night whipped against her face, forcing her to realize for the first time exactly how drunk she was. When they got through the gate, they were standing in a small alley between houses. The crowd was moving toward the main road, but Lucifer grabbed her wrist and pulled her in the other direction. They reached a gap between a house and an apartment complex. They ran through it together, their breath and the footsteps echoing around them. His hand still circled her wrist, gripping tighter as they emerged onto a quieter residential street. They could hear the sirens of the cop cars in the distance.  
“I think we’re away from the prying eyes of the press,” Lucifer said between gasps for air. He sat heavily on the curb, giggling as he fell back a little before righting himself. He leaned on his firmly planted hands. “Shall I call you an Uber, Darling?” he said slowly. He smiled sloppily at her.  
Chloe took a second to feel guilty for loosening him up with liquor before she responded, “Let’s walk back at least to yours. I can call one from there.” At least she was also feeling very loosened up as well. It was only fair.  
“Walk,” he repeated uncertainly. Then he nodded fervently. “Yes. Yes. Let’s walk. It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”  
“It is,” Chloe agreed even though the cold bit at her fingers. She put a hand on Lucifer’s elbow to help guide him up. He looked at it for a moment but didn’t draw back. “You gotta stand up if you want to walk home, Lucifer.”  
“Ah.” He clumsily rose to his feet. She set a slow pace, stuffing her hands into her tight pockets, and he shambled along beside her. “I think we got some fantastic intel tonight, don’t you?”  
Chloe nodded. She adjusted their positions so she was between him and the road. Better safe than sorry. “I do. And the night is still going, so our deal still stands, right?” She smirked up at him.  
He glanced down at her. Confusion on his face turned to understanding, and he smirked. “Ah yes. A deal’s a deal. Ask away.”  
Chloe consulted her mental list. “Why are you named Lucifer? You can’t convince me that you think it’s a normal name.”  
He pressed his lips together and returned to looking ahead of them. The street lights shadowed his face in a way that made his pensive expression unsettling. “A deal’s a deal,” he repeated and sighed heavily.  
Chloe started to feel guilty. “Lucifer--” she started, but he had already begun speaking.  
“My parents are quite...” He paused and tilted his head, settling on the right word. “Old fashioned. Some of their beliefs border on archaic.” He stopped again. They had reached a crosswalk, and he studied the signal button as he slowly pressed it. There were no cars passing, but they still waited for their turn. “Tell me, Chloe. Have you ever heard the old belief that when twins are born, the first born is the good one, the one that was meant to be created, and the second is his... shadow? The evil one.”  
“I mean, yeah, I have.” Chloe noticed that they had the signal and put a hand lightly on his arm to get him walking with her again. “But I didn’t think literally anyone still believed that.”  
Lucifer chuckled. “Well. My brother Michael emerged from the womb eight minutes before I did.”  
“You have a twin?” Chloe gaped. She tried to imagine a second Lucifer running around in the world.  
“I do. Identical, actually. It’s uncanny seeing us stand side by side.” Bitterness edged into his voice.  
“So—what?” Chloe sped up and flipped around so she was walking backwards, facing him. “Your parents went with the evil younger twin trope and named you after the literal devil?” Lucifer nodded. “That’s... crazy.”  
“Preaching to the choir, Darling.”  
Oh, the shots were really hitting her. She stumbled and reoriented herself walking forward beside Lucifer. To her surprise, he reached out a hand to softly steady her. As soon as she was walking straight, he retracted it.  
“Of course,” he continued, “they called me by middle name in public. Imagine what the churchgoers would think of my mother was shouting the devil’s name every time she wanted my attention.”  
She had so many follow up questions. Was his relationship with his brother defined by this crackpot belief? Did his parents treat him like an evil child from the beginning? The memory of his scars made her jaw clench. She shivered. As she weighed the advantages of each question, she felt something on her shoulders. She jumped then realized that Lucifer had draped his jacket over her shoulders.  
He looked at her uncertainly then released it when she reached up to secure it. “Are you cold?”  
“Sort of.” She slipped her arms into the sleeves. The jacket was already warm from his body heat, and she felt herself melting into it. She smiled, and a grin broke out on his face in response.  
They walked in silence for a few moments. Surprisingly, it was Lucifer who broke it by saying, “I find it hard to believe that was your most burning question, detective.”  
“I’m thinking,” she responded, trying not to laugh. Of course he was eager to answer questions about himself, no matter how dark, the little narcissist. “Alright—um—so your back.” She glanced up at his face cautiously. He kept it suspiciously neutral. “You said it was a boring story.”  
He nodded.  
“Doesn’t look boring.” She played with the bottom of Lucifer’s jacket. “I mean… What even causes scars like that? Who…”  
Lucifer’s forced casualness broke. As they passed under a streetlight, Chloe could see that his expression had fallen. He forced a bitter smile but the drunkenness in his eyes made him look crazed. Chloe swallowed.  
“Let’s just say—my father is a difficult man.” The look he gave her as he said it begged her not to ask. Not that she wanted to. She found herself shivering again as he tried to put the puzzle together on her own. Dogmatic Christians, so old-fashioned in their beliefs that they pegged Lucifer as an evil child from the moment he was born—and who left him with scarring so severe it still looked like that all these years later.  
Chloe caught herself gaping at him and snapped her mouth shut. “Lucifer, I’m… I’m so sorry that—”  
“So what’s our working theory, Detective?” he interrupted.  
They rounded a corner, and his house was in sight. Chloe debated calling her Uber proactively, but decided to stretch out her time with Lucifer tonight—so they could discuss the case, of course.  
“Our theory is that Delilah was a well-liked girl who was dating a douchebag,” she said. “I’m not sure what you want to extrapolate from that.”  
“I suppose we’ll just have to see what Delilah’s counselor has to say, won’t we?”  
Despite her better sense, Chloe responded, “Yeah, I guess we will. I’ll see if I can find her information in the morning.”  
They reached Lucifer’s lawn. He stopped and looked out at the road for a long moment. “I can call your Uber.” He pulled out his phone. “Or, if I could interest you in a nightcap…” He motioned toward his front door.  
“I… okay, yeah.”  
Lucifer grinned and led her inside. She hadn’t stopped to take in much of the house earlier, too caught up in her horror at Lucifer’s nakedness and exposed scars. Now, when Lucifer flicked on the lights, she gave the living room an appraising scan. It was sparsely furnished, with a modern couch and a glass coffee table facing a flat screen TV, which was placed atop an empty entertainment center.  
He motioned toward the couch. “Have a seat. Can I interest you in anything other than tequila?”  
Chloe sat down carefully, and was pleased to find that the couch was actually pretty clean for a college home. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”  
“Careful,” a woman’s voice said. Chloe looked toward the hallway and saw a girl about their age walking out. She was wearing a crop top, leggings, and combat boots. It looks like she was preparing to go out for the night. “He’ll hand you straight bourbon and be offended when you don’t want it.”  
Lucifer stopped on his way to the kitchen to shoot her a look. “Bourbon is a classy drink, Maze. Chloe, this is Maze. Maze, Chloe. Maze is my roommate.”  
Chloe waved, trying not to look timid. She knew immediately that she was not the kind of person Maze liked. “Nice to meet you.”  
Maze nodded in response. She walked into the kitchen, saying, “I’ll make you something good. I gotta pregame anyway.” The volume of her voice raised as she disappeared, still talking to Chloe. Rather than shout back, Chloe got up and followed her in.  
“Maze thinks because she’s a bartender, everyone else is uncultured swine who don’t know good alcohol,” Lucifer said. He moved out of the way for Chloe to enter the room then leaned on the doorframe, watching as she approached Maze.  
“Everyone is uncultured swine.” Maze went to a bar cart against the wall of the kitchen. Next to it was a tall dining table, the only other thing in the room aside from the standard kitchen appliances. Chloe didn’t get the feeling they spent much time there. “You seem like a tequila sour girl,” Maze continued.  
“That sounds awesome, actually,” Chloe said with as much friendliness as possible. She couldn't risk being seen as unlikeable by the girl who was giving her free liquor.  
Maze poured a shot of tequila, tossed it back, and then went about making Chloe’s drink. When she finished it and handed it to Chloe, she took another shot and slammed the glass down. “Alright, kiddos, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She grabbed a purse off the table and started to walk out.  
Lucifer didn’t move from his position blocking the door. “You’re not gonna make me a drink?”  
“Make your own damn drink. You’re a big boy.” Maze tapped his chest with her palm. He rolled his eyes, forcing down a smile, and got out of the way so Maze could shove past him. “Don’t hook up with any more gross frat boys out there!” he shouted as the front door opened.  
“Fuck you!” Maze shouted, and the door slammed shut behind her.  
“She seems… nice.” Chloe leaned her weight back on the counter and sipped her drink. It was good.  
Lucifer went to the bar cart and picked up a decanter filled with dark liquor. “She’s not. Best friend I’ve ever had though.”  
He motioned back toward the living room, and she followed him to go sit on the couch. Chloe made sure to leave some room between them when she settled in, but they were still close enough that she could feel the cushion dip from his weight. He sat slightly on his side so he was facing her. Chloe took another sip of her drink, suddenly feeling too shy to make eye contact him.  
“How did you two meet?”  
Lucifer grinned. “We met in high school actually. I went to a very small school. Maze’s parents ran it.” Chloe was starting to have serious doubts about the effectiveness of that Christian education if Lucifer and Maze were both products of it.  
“Private school then?” she asked because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.  
“Mhm.”  
Chloe looked up from her drink finally and her stomach flipped when she saw the eyes Lucifer was giving her. There was desire in them, but it wasn’t the usual half-joking, hungry stare that he gave her. Instead, he had a soft smile on his face as he studied hers.  
“I’m glad I came tonight,” she blurted out. Oh, she must have been even drunker than she thought. “I know I didn’t want to play detective, but I… I had a good time.”  
Lucifer’s smile grew even wider. He reached out slowly and pushed a piece of hair out of her face, his fingers brushing softly against her cheek as he did so. His hand was cold from holding his drink--Chloe swore she could still feel his touch after he’d taken his hand away. She reminded herself to breathe.  
“I’m glad you came too,” he said finally. “Couldn’t have done it without you.”  
“Well, obviously, I am the brains of this operation.”  
“Clearly.”  
Lucifer leaned forward slowly, putting his hand back where it belonged on Chloe’s cheek. He searched her eyes as he got closer. She closed them and closed the distance between them, pressing their lips together. He kissed her slowly. The taste of bourbon on his breath distracted Chloe and it seemed that suddenly his hands were threading through her hair.  
This was nice. This was really nice--but, oh God, it was stupid, so incredibly stupid.  
Chloe deepened their kiss, and Lucifer responded by pulling her toward him and onto his lap. She straddled his legs on her knees. When his hands found the hem of her shirt, she pulled away, sitting back so her weight was toward his knees.  
Lucifer snatched his hands back. “Sorry,” he said, looking rebuked. He rubbed at one palm with the other thumb.  
“It’s okay,” Chloe said breathlessly. She licked her lips. “I just can’t…”  
He nodded, and he was starting to look a little like a kicked dog. Chloe had to stop herself from reaching out to rest a hand on his chest. “Of course, of course, my apologies for overstepping.”  
“You didn’t--ugh--no, you’re fine. You didn’t do anything wrong.” She crawled off of him and stood up. She really didn’t know where to go from here. Some stupid part of her wanted to stay and gaze into his dark eyes and have his hands in her hair again, but she didn’t see this night ending any way except him attempting to go further than she wanted to again. “I should go. We do have class tomorrow.”  
Lucifer bit his lip and stood quickly. “Right. Of course. Can’t have crime fighting interfering with our valuable education. I’ll call you an Uber.”  
She stood in the entryway, pretending to be looking at things on her phone and slowly finishing her drink. Lucifer leaned against the arm of the couch, doing the same. When headlights in the window indicated that her ride had arrived, Chloe bid him an awkward goodbye and hurried to the car. Lucifer watched until she’d gotten in then disappeared back into his house, closing the door slowly and moresly.  
When Chloe made it home, she collapsed immediately into her bed. She realized that she still had Lucifer’s jacket on, and she pretended it was the warmth rather than the smell of him that caused her to keep it on as she fell asleep.


	2. Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well this was supposed to be a two part story but I got carried away and now it's gonna be three parts. Here's part two!

Chloe’s eyes slid open as she slowly registered the sound of her alarm going off. She flipped over and reached for where her phone would normally be on her nightstand. Her hand slapped down on the wood with no phone. She fumbled around her bed and eventually found the ringing phone in her jacket pocket—Lucifer’s jacket pocket. She recalled climbing into bed the night before still fully clothed.   
She kept her eyes half opened and checked the time on her phone. Her alarm must’ve been going off for a while, as she was already late to class. She really should get up and get herself there, but her bed was so warm and cozy.   
She finally thought to shut off the alarm and checked her notifications. Two missed calls from Lucifer, one an hour ago and another only five minutes ago. She frowned and unlocked a text notification from him. “Call me,” it read. She opened his contact and did as instructed.   
“Chloe,” he answered the phone breathily. “I was getting worried.” His sentence trailed off into a forced chuckle.   
Chloe rubbed her face, prying gunk from her eyes. “Sorry, I guess I should’ve let you know when I got home safe.” She tried to picture Lucifer kept awake with concern about her voyage home.   
“No—well, yeah, I would’ve appreciated that—but no,” Lucifer said quickly. It sounded like he was walking. “I heard someone got fucking killed on your floor last night, and they didn’t say who or what room, and then you weren’t in class, and I…” He coughed awkwardly. “I’m actually almost to your building.”  
Chloe’s tired brain took longer than it should’ve to process what he was telling her. “Someone got murdered?”  
“That’s the word on the street.” It sounded like he had stopped walking and was trying valiantly to cover up how hard he was working to catch his breath. “Honestly, I should get a police scanner at this point.”  
“Jesus.” Chloe rubbed her face and pulled herself out of bed. Somehow her roommate had slept through all of her alarms as well and was sprawled out in bed, her Switch on her chest. “I just woke up. I don’t even know anything.”  
Lucifer didn’t respond immediately. Then he said, “Thanks. Yup. Good morning.” She realized that he wasn’t talking to her. “Okay, I’m about to get in the elevator, I’ll see you in a minute.” He hung up.   
Chloe set her phone down. She walked slowly over to her door, terrified of what she would see when she opened it. Carefully, so the noise wouldn’t wake Ella, she released the deadbolt, opened the door, and peeked out. At first, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Then she noticed movement at the end of the corridor. She grabbed her key from her nightstand and walked out into the hallway.   
She moved far enough down that she could see around the corner. One of the doors was wide open, and caution tape was spiderwebbed across the doorway. It was the only single room on the floor; she knew that, but she didn’t know who lived there. She looked at the plaque next to it. 222.   
A hand touched her arm, and she jumped, spinning around and stepping away. Lucifer stepped back as well, putting his hands up. “Good morning to you too,” he said.   
“Oh, sorry.” Chloe put her hand on her chest, trying to tell her heart to stop racing. She motioned to the crime scene room. “It’s Grey.”  
“Whom?” Lucifer seemed more interested in staring at his jacket on her body. He didn’t even look up at her face when he held out a bag from the cafe to her.   
Chloe gestured again. “From last night? Beer pong guy? We were talking to him right before the cops showed up?”  
“What about him?”   
Lucifer finally looked her in the eyes. She could see that his face was patchy from exerting himself in the cold morning air. The edges of his hair had escaped the structure of gel to start curling. There had obviously been an effort made to look presentable this morning even after the night they had.   
“That’s his room. He’s the only person who lives there.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Chloe saw a police officer emerge from the room and start walking toward them.   
“Hey kids, you can’t hover here,” he told them gruffly. He looked like the kind of cop who would’ve rolled his eyes when her dad had brought her into the station.   
Chloe could see Lucifer puffing up, about to attempt to win the officer over. She put her hand on his arm and said, “Sorry, Officer. Just wondering what all the commotion was—I live right over there.” She motioned vaguely toward her room.   
“Well, this is an active crime scene. You better get out of here before I think you’re up to something.”  
Chloe led Lucifer back to her room. She poked her head in to make sure Ella was decent before allowing him in. “Ella, Lucifer. Lucifer, Ella,” she formally introduced them for the first time.   
Ella had already gotten herself dressed and was sitting at her desk with her laptop open. She tilted her head to take in Lucifer. “You a method actor or something?”  
Lucifer gave her an amused look. “Nope, just my name.”  
“Ah.” Chloe saw Ella reflexively reach for the crucifix around her neck before quickly aborting the movement. She blinked a few times. “You must get that a lot, huh.” She laughed a little.   
“This is a first for ‘method actor’.”   
Lucifer turned away from her to watch Chloe, who had pulled out her own laptop and was pulling up a news site. She googled the name of their school and “death” to see if anyone had reported anything yet. If anything, she just wanted to confirm that it was Grey. The top results were all about Delilah, and there was an old article about an alcohol poisoning death from 2013. Scrolling didn’t show her much else.   
Lucifer was now peeking over her shoulder silently.   
She went back to the search bar and deleted the word “death” and added “news today”. She was heartened to see new stories line up at the top of the results. Unfortunately, they all had her name in them. “Chloe Decker embraces party girl persona with mystery man!” “Hot Tub High School star spotted at party later shut down for illegal activity!” She clicked the first one and was shown a picture of herself with Lucifer hanging on her, both their smiling faces lit up by the backyard lights. They were both holding a drink and clearly drunk.   
“Fuck,” she said quietly.   
Lucifer pulled back from her. “Never mind the murdered student. Chloe Decker drinks alcohol.” He rolled his eyes.   
Ella looked up from her work. “Murdered?”  
Lucifer waved his hand dismissively.   
Chloe read quickly through the article. It reminded everyone about her sordid past, the photo, and the fact that her father had died nearly a year ago. Then it described how scandalous the party had been. Eventually, it turned its focus to her “mystery man”. “Shit,” she said, “They figured out who you are.”  
Lucifer grinned. “Well, I’ve always wanted to be famous.” Then his face slowly fell. “Is my name in it?”  
She nodded. “I’m so sorry. Hopefully they won’t bother you.”  
She felt horrible already. Though she’d known she was risking a media circus by going out last night, she hadn’t even thought about how Lucifer could be dragged into it. If anyone would be able to handle the constant attention of the press, it would be Lucifer, she hoped. She almost secretly desired to see him puff up for a chasing cameraman.   
He pulled her computer from her and scrolled through the article, his lips pressed tightly. “Well. I’d have worn a different shirt if I’d known this was my big break.” He handed her the computer back and when she looked back up from grabbing it, he was smiling again. The rapid shift jolted Chloe. She frowned at him.   
“Are you sure you’re okay? I know better than anyone how it feels to have your privacy invaded like this.” She closed her laptop and set it down on her bed. She considered calling her lawyer, to see if she could get anything done about the stories. She doubted it, but it was always worth a try. The less press, the better.   
Before Lucifer could answer, Ella spoke again. “Is no one gonna explain the murdered thing to me?”  
Chloe gave Lucifer another worried look over before focusing on Ella. “There’s a bunch of police activity over at 222. People are saying the guy who lives there got killed last night.”  
“Damn,” Ella breathed out. “I really used to think campus was safe but after…” She looked at Chloe and stopped. “It’s just crazy.”  
“Yes, that’s a word for it,” Lucifer drawled. He had pulled out his phone while Chloe was talking to Ella and was now texting rapidly. Despite his best efforts to appear nonchalant, Chloe could see tenseness in his face. As much as she wanted to pry, she held back. He’d already brushed her off a few times--pushing further would only make him retreat. This was sober Lucifer, she reminded herself, not fun and open, drunk Lucifer.   
He turned to Chloe and said in a low voice, “Do you finally agree with me that something is amiss?”  
She sighed. “Two connected students dead in a few weeks? Yeah, I think something weird is happening on campus.”  
Lucifer threw up his hands. “Thank you!” He started pacing up and down her dorm, his strides so long that he could only take a few steps before turning on his heel and heading the other direction. Chloe saw Ella’s eyes tracking him and resisted the urge to apologize for him.   
“Alright,” she said finally. “We need to get in to see Delilah’s counselor. We’ll see what she has to say and then go from there.” Lucifer nodded his agreement, so she pulled out her phone to call the counseling center and set up an appointment. She saw the time. “Shit!” She flung her phone down on her bed and started pulling appropriate clothes out of her drawers.   
“What’s happening?” Lucifer asked. He stopped pacing.   
“I’m supposed to be somewhere after class, and class is almost over,” she explained. She motioned for Lucifer to turn around, which he did, and changed quickly into jeans and a t-shirt. She put her own jacket on and folded up Lucifer’s.   
“What? You can’t just go running off. We’re kind of in a crisis here,” Lucifer objected. “We’re trying to solve a murder.”  
“Alright.” She spun him back around and shoved his jacket into his hands. “Come with me then, and we’ll get back to crimefighting right after.”  
He didn’t disagree, so she shepherded him down to the parking lot and into the car. He didn’t say anything on the drive over. Instead, he looked thoughtfully out the window. It was the quietest and least annoying Chloe had ever seen him. She debated asking again if he was actually not bothered by the pap story about him, but she decided against getting him all ruffled up.  
When they reached the elementary school, Chloe reached into the backseat for her backpack. When she twisted back around, she jumped. Lucifer had gotten out of the car immediately after parking and was opening her door. She sighed and climbed out, nodding in thanks.   
“What, pray tell, could we possibly be doing here?” he asked her cautiously. He watched a young kid dart across the lawn and sneered.   
Chloe frowned. She should have predicted that he was the type to hate children. “I’m in a mentorship program. I’m a big sister,” she explained.   
“How noble.”  
The dismissal bell rang for break as they walked toward the front doors, and a few moments later, Trixie burst through them. She caught sight of Chloe. “Chlo!” A second later, she was wrapped around Chloe’s waist in a hug.   
“Hey, Trixella,” Chloe said warmly. She set a hand on the girl’s head. They met every other week, and she’d gotten attached enough that she started to miss Trixie between those times.  
Trixie quickly untangled herself from Chloe and turned to Lucifer. “Who are you?”  
Lucifer lifted one eyebrow. He stared her down with more intensity than one should at a child. “I’m Lucifer,” he finally responded.   
“Like the devil?” Trixie asked immediately.   
Just as Chloe chastised, “Trixie!”, Lucifer responded, “Exactly. And what is your name, small child?”  
“My name is Beatrice, but everyone calls me Trixie.”  
He grimaced. “That’s a hooker’s name.”  
Now Chloe had to chastise the grown man. “Lucifer.”  
He gave Chloe a look of faux confusion. He turned back to Trixie when she asked, “What’s a hooker?” and he responded, “Ask your parents.”  
“Lucifer!” Chloe had had quite enough of this interaction and decided it was time for her to take over. Both Trixie and Lucifer seemed to have the same level of maturity. “Trix, this is my friend. He’s going to hang out with us today, if that’s okay with you.”  
Trixie looked Lucifer up and down carefully. “Yeah.”  
“Great.” Chloe reached out to take Trixie’s hand. They had planned last week that they would take a walk together this week, so she started to lead her to a walking path that started behind the school. Lucifer trailed after them, hands stuffed moodily into his pockets.   
“So, Trixella, how was your day?” Chloe asked. She took Trixie’s hand.   
Trixie sighed. “The mean girl was bullying me again, so I got in trouble.” Trixie had been having issues with a girl a few years older than her on the playground. Chloe had tried to get her to go to a teacher for help.  
“You got in trouble for being bullied?” Chloe asked.   
Trixie shook her head. “No. I got in trouble for kicking her in her no-no-touch-touch square.”  
“What’s a no-no-touch-touch square?” Lucifer asked from behind them. Chloe hadn’t even known he’d been listening. Trixie turned to face him and used her eyes to motion to his no-no-touch-touch square. He grinned. “Oh! Well done.”  
Chloe squeezed Trixie’s hand to regain her attention and launched into a lecture about not resorting to violence. She could tell neither Lucifer nor Trixie was fully paying attention to it, but it was her responsibility as the big sister. “And honestly, Trixie, how does this make you any better than her?”  
Trixie stared up at her and seemed to be formulating a response, but she turned to look at Lucifer. Chloe followed her gaze and saw that he had stopped walking. He was looking at his phone. He held it up, and Chloe could see he was getting a call. “I need to take this. Will you two be coming back this way?”  
Chloe nodded, and he answered the phone with a curt, “Yes?” This definitely didn’t seem like a conversation she was meant to be privy to, so she tugged Trixie’s hand to get her walking again.   
As soon as they were out of Lucifer’s earshot, Trixie asked, “Is Lucifer your boyfriend?”  
Chloe blushed, and immediately hated herself for it. She balked. “No, no. He’s my… friend.” Was he even that? She was past her single day obligation of helping him, and yet here they were, working together still. That had to be something.   
Trixie hummed. “Do you have a crush on him?” she prodded. She poked at Chloe’s arm with her free hand. “You yell at him a lot. Teacher said sometimes people pick on people when they have a crush.”  
Chloe laughed. “I do not yell at him a lot.” Trixie raised her eyebrows. Chloe scoffed. “Whatever. Tell me how the math test went.”  
Trixie gabbed for the rest of their walk. She didn’t even falter when they reached the end of the trail and turned around, back toward Lucifer. To Chloe’s surprise he was still on the phone when they reached him. He was leaning against a tree, running his fingers through his hair with the hand not holding his phone. He noticed them approaching. “Listen, I have to go.” He paused. “Ray-Ray. I can handle it. Leave it alone. Do. Not. Stick your neck out.”   
Interesting. Chloe filed away the nickname Ray-Ray.   
“Okay. Okay. Call me if you need anything. I will. Okay. Bye.” He hung up, took a deep breath, and turned to Chloe and Trixie. “Ah, I see my clever plan to get out of the brisk exercise has worked.”  
“Is everything okay?” Chloe asked, because she couldn’t stop herself.   
“Why wouldn’t it be?” he challenged. She could see the dare in his eyes: Keep prying and see how I react. It was clear that he had finished upholding his end of their bargain even if she hadn’t.   
She backed down.   
They got Trixie back to school before recess was over and bid her goodbye. She gave Chloe a customary parting hug then threw herself at Lucifer, wrapping her arms around his legs. He jolted, throwing his hands up. He looked desperately at Chloe, moving one hand down to stiffly pat Trixie’s head.   
“Yes, very good,” he stuttered out. “Off you hop.” He pried her arms off of him and spun her to face the school. Trixie waved one last time and headed back inside.   
Once she’d disappeared, Lucifer said, “you enjoy spending your time with the young urchin?”  
Chloe didn’t have enough energy to unpack all of that. “I do. She’s a good kid.”  
“Hm.” Lucifer started walking back to her car, and she hurried after him. “Now, can we please focus on the important matter at hand?”  
Chloe got back into her car and pulled out her phone. She googled the on campus counseling center and called their number. Lucifer watched her expectantly from the passenger seat.   
“LAC health and counseling services,” the phone was answered.   
“Hi, um, I’m a student, and I was hoping to make an appointment,” Chloe pitched her voice up a little bit. “I saw someone a while back, and I wanted to come again.”  
“Are you currently in crisis?”  
Chloe weighed her options. She wanted an appointment as quickly as possible, but worried that if she said yes they would tell her to go to an emergency room and she’d have to come up with an entirely new script. “No, no,” she answered, hoping it had been quick enough.   
“What’s your name?” the receptionist asked.   
“Chloe Decker.”  
“I don’t see you in the system, Chloe. Are you sure you’ve been here before?”  
“Yeah, definitely. I saw a girl. Um… Lacy?” She paused for dramatic effect. “No! Linda! Her name was Linda. She helped me a lot, so I’d really like to see her again.”  
“That’s weird it’s not in here…” Chloe could hear something being typed. “Alright. Well Linda’s next open appointment is Tuesday at noon. There’s also some at 1 pm, 1:30 pm…”  
Chloe mouthed ‘Tuesday noon’ to Lucifer, who nodded. “Tuesday at noon works!” she said chipperly into the phone.   
“Great. I’ll send a confirmation to your student email.”  
When Chloe got off the phone, she immediately opened up her calendar to add the appointment to her calendar. She was busy enough without the added complication of a literal murder investigation; it was only a matter of time before things started getting dropped left and right. Once that was done, she took a moment to make notes of things she had talked about with Trixie that day and things she should ask about next time. Finally, she looked up to see Lucifer staring at her expectantly.   
“Well?” he asked.   
“Appointment Tuesday at noon with Linda.”  
Lucifer didn’t respond immediately. Then he said, “So we just wait?” He sounded more confused than upset.   
“Yup.” Chloe started her car and began backing out. “Lots of waiting in police work I’m afraid.”  
“That’s a bit boring.”  
Chloe nodded her agreement and started heading in the direction to drop Lucifer off at home. “Not much else we can do. Maybe if we felt like getting crazy, we could work on our actual assignment for our actual class.” She glanced at Lucifer and saw that he was texting rapidly again.   
He grunted in response. “I would but I’ve got work later and I’m gonna need a solid four hours to emotionally prepare. So as you see, I’m very booked.”  
“You’re impossible.” Chloe felt anger rise up in her chest. She shouldn’t be surprised that this had become a one-way street. He needed something from her—her help—and he was getting it. He had no reason to do anything for her, so why would he—especially now that he was sure she wasn’t going to sleep with him.   
A part of her was tempted to drop him immediately. Take him home and then never speak of any of this again. Delilah’s murderer was dead, and Chloe was just an idiot to be entertaining Lucifer’s selfish search for a story. However, a part of her wasn’t sure. Now that Grey was dead too. It probably wasn’t connected. Chances were that the two murders were unconnected.   
But something was weird, and Lucifer seemed to be the only person interested in looking into it. Chloe’s self-destructive need for the truth was going to keep her tethered to him. She didn’t have to like it though.   
She drove silently and didn’t say anything when she pulled over in front of his house. He looked up from his phone to see they were there. He unbuckled his seatbelt. “Alright well.” He stared at her for a moment. “If you want, you could come by Lux tonight and I’ll smuggle you a free drink.”  
“I have things to do,” she replied shortly.   
He looked taken aback. “Right, of course.” He hesitated for a moment then clumsily got out of the car and waved before slamming the door shut. He looked back at her uncertainly a few times as he walked up to his front door.   
Chloe drove off without waving goodbye.   
~.~  
“Okay, so what’s our plan for the day?” Chloe huffed as she climbed over Lucifer’s stretched legs to her usual desk. She didn’t even pull out a notebook, knowing she wouldn’t be able to focus. She’d gotten over the majority of her frustration with him over the past several days, and had come to terms with the fact that it was not going to be an even partnership.   
Lucifer looked up from laptop, and Chloe startled. His left eye was blackened, and his lip was split. He didn’t seem to notice her reaction. “You act all traumatized. I play the supportive friend. Let me do most of the talking, since it’s a woman. I may need to lay on the charm.” He winked, and his bruised skin stretched.  
“Lucifer, what happened to your face?” She started to reach out to touch the bruising but thought better of it, remembering how he’d reacted when she tried to touch his back.   
He blinked, seeming to suddenly remember what his face looked like. “Just a squabble between brothers.” He smiled at her, tight lipped.   
“What? Your brother?” Chloe shook her head in confusion. “I didn’t know your family was around here.”  
“They’re not. My brother has made an unexpected visit,” Lucifer hissed. Then he rearranged his face and shrugged.   
Choe’s mind raced. She remembered that Clark had told her Lucifer’s family lived up in Oregon. It seemed strange for one of them to just drop by unexpectedly from all that way. Lucifer clearly wasn’t happy about it. His brother had to want something—something worth physical violence.   
“You know,” he said after a long moment of silence, “I have managed to stay off their radar for four years. I haven’t spoken to any of them since I was seventeen.” He turned to her, not even pretending to smile. “And all it took was one picture with you for my family to find me.” He searched her face for something, his face squeezed into false humor.   
Chloe’s stomach flipped, and she knew she was gaping at him, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Lucifer, I…” She remembered how he’d gone tense upon reading the article, how he’d seemed thoughtful and quiet afterward. He’d known this would happen. “I am so sorry.”  
“Nothing I can’t handle. My brother thinks he’s tougher than he is.” Lucifer drummed his fingers on his keyboard absently. Chloe held her breath.   
“Okay,” she said, knowing him well enough to know what he wanted to hear right now: a change of subject. “Well, try to show a little emotion for the counselor. Otherwise she’s gonna think you’re a psychopath.”  
“Do you think I’m a psychopath?”  
“It is way too early for your shit, Lucifer.”  
He grinned at her, and Chloe’s heart jumped. She looked away quickly.   
After class, they walked over to the student counseling office and sat outside Linda’s office while they waited for her to retrieve them for Chloe’s appointment. Lucifer’s leg kept bouncing, and Chloe tried not to acknowledge it. She wanted to delve more into the mystery of his brother’s appearance, but wasn’t sure how closed off he would be. She remembered Lucifer saying he had an identical twin, and she kept imagining a perfectly matched tussle with two Lucifers.   
Chloe was so caught up in her thoughts that she jumped when the office door opened and a blonde woman stepped out. She looked to be around Chloe’s age, maybe a little older. She looked between Chloe and Lucifer for a brief moment. “Chloe?” she asked.   
“Yeah, hi, that’s me.” Chloe stood up and reached out to shake Linda’s hand. “Is it okay if my friend comes in with me? He’s been supporting me a lot through everything.”  
Linda looked uncertain for a moment, chewing at her bottom lip. She turned her gaze to Lucifer, and Chloe didn’t even have to look to know that he had straightened up and preened for her. Linda’s eyes spent a little too long looking him up and down. “Alright,” she said finally, “I suppose that’s fine for today. Whatever makes you feel most comfortable.”  
“Thanks!” Chloe and Lucifer followed Linda into her office, and sat down side by side on the couch she motioned to.   
Linda grabbed a notepad and sat facing them. She pushed up her glasses. “Alright, Chloe, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what brings you in today?”  
Chloe cleared her throat and launched into the script she had prepared for herself. She folded her hands in her lap as she started, “I’ve been really struggling to cope with the deaths on campus lately. I knew Delilah--we both did” --she stopped to motion to Lucifer-- “and Grey as well. So when they both died… And well, we were both there when Delilah…” She rubbed at her eyes, pretending to be fighting off tears.   
“That must have been very traumatic,” Linda said in an even voice. “Is this the first time you’ve talked to someone about the day that Delilah died?”  
Chloe nodded. “We basically only talk to each other about,” she said, even though they had never really discussed that day. “And it’s been hard not to have… other people who knew Delilah to talk to. She was very closed off, so she didn’t have a lot of friends that we could grieve her with.” She looked down, hoping to seem a little embarrassed. “That’s kind of why I chose you to come see; I know that she was seeing you.”  
“Well, I’m not allowed to discuss the things I talk about with my other patients,” Linda said, frowning. She adjusted herself in her chair like she was uncomfortable. “But I would love to hear some of your memories about Delilah.”  
Chloe acted like she was in deep thought for a second. “She was kind of… what I wanted to be a lot of the time. She was nice and popular, and she got a lot of guys.” God--this was embarrassing. She just prayed that Lucifer knew she would never actually be saying this, or she would never hear the end of it.  
Lucifer jumped in, “That’s a nice way of saying she slept around, Chloe.”  
Linda turned her attention to him. She blinked, looked away quickly, then cleared her throat and finally made eye contact with him. He smiled at her, his posture relaxing as he gave her a once-over. Chloe tried not to roll her eyes.   
“You think it’s a bad thing that Delilah was with a lot of men?” Linda asked clinically. Chloe could see the gears turning in her head; she was definitely about to ask if she and Lucifer had slept together.   
Lucifer shrugged. “I’m in no position to be judging someone for their sexual endeavours,” he said, smirking at Linda in a way that Chloe was very familiar with. “But it would be nice if all her relations weren’t casual, so we actually knew some of the people who knew her.”  
“Right,” Chloe interjected. “It’s like… we don’t even know who Delilah was hanging out with the past few months before she died.”  
Linda blinked hard. She knew.   
She and Chloe made long eye contact, and Chloe could tell that Linda was waiting for her to ask. When she didn’t say anything, Linda said, “I’m afraid that’s not something I can share with you.”  
“Come on,” Lucifer whined. “She’s dead. Privacy’s a bit out the window.”  
“Yes, but…” Linda cleared her throat. She had a weird expression on her face that Chloe couldn’t quite place. “The other party also deserves privacy.”  
Lucifer leaned forward with his knees on his elbows. “Is that something that’s important to you, Linda? Privacy?” He was practically purring, and Chloe wasn’t sure if she was furious or a little attracted to him.   
Linda stuttered. “The most important thing is that my patients feel their privacy is being protected.”  
“I can be private,” Lucifer said, smiling at her. He had her captivated. Chloe watched in awe as Linda couldn’t look away from him. “You and I… We could keep it, among other things, between us--but you’ve got to tell me who Delilah was seeing.”  
This was… unethical, to start. Chloe knew she should say something to break the spell that Lucifer seemed to have the counselor under, but she was honestly kind of impressed. Lucifer grabbed Linda’s notepad from her hand, ripped off a piece of paper, and scribbled down his phone number. He held it out in front of him. When Linda reached for it, he drew back a little bit, raising an eyebrow. “Come now; give a little, take a little, right?” he tested.   
Linda looked guiltily over at Chloe for a brief second before she sighed and said, “It was Grey Cooper.”  
Lucifer handed her the paper with his number on it. “I’m so glad we understand each other.”  
Grey Cooper--who had been murdered last week with no leads on the case, who had been at the party and talking to Chloe only hours before his death--had been the man that Delilah was cheating on 2Vile with. There was no way this wasn’t connected. Chloe believed in coincidences, but this was too much.   
They had to look at his death if they were ever going to find out more about Delilah’s. Chloe debated briefly the repercussions of breaking into a crime scene. In addition to criminal charges, it would also be another stain on her public image if they got caught--but she knew that the part of her that wanted so desperately to solve this mystery could not be stopped.   
She and Lucifer looked at each other and both stood. “Give me a call, Doctor,” Lucifer said. “And we’ll finish up that discussion of privacy. I’m a man of my word.”  
Linda rose as well and opened her office door for them. She looked flustered, like she wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened. “I’m not a doctor yet, just a counselor,” she said, staring up at him with big eyes.  
“Not yet.” Lucifer winked at her. “But someday, and that’s what matters.”  
The look that Linda was giving him made Chloe scared she might jump him right there, so Chloe put her hand on his arm and nudged him back toward the outside. When they emerged into the sunlight, Lucifer’s entire demeanor switched back to the more casual one she was used to.  
“I can’t believe you seriously just agreed to sleep with her for information,” Chloe said, and it came out more scandalized than she had intended. She slipped her sunglasses on, trying to look casual.   
He looked down at her with his eyebrows pinched. “Did you not think she was attractive?” he asked.   
Chloe tried not to gape at him. “Sure, but you’re getting dangerously close to prostitution.”   
“Please, Detective. The world is run on sex for favors.”   
Lucifer stuck his hands in his pockets and squinted against the sun. He peered out across the mass of students rushing between classes. Chloe looked him over—his inappropriately formal attire, his lanky limbs, the vaguely amused but bored expression on his bruised face—and was struck by the impression that he did not belong there. She was so used to his presence, but if she passed him on a walkway, she would have taken a second look and wondered what he was doing there. She couldn’t imagine where he looked like he belonged.   
When she realized she’d been staring at him too long, she blurted out, “So… what? You’re just out here sleeping with people to get things from them... frequently?”  
Lucifer rolled his eyes. “How do you think I got my job at Lux? How do you think Delilah got her contract?”  
“You slept with someone to get Delilah her modeling contract?”  
He rocked his head a few times. “More like I’d been sleeping with a rich old woman who frequented Lux until I eventually figured out how she could be of assistance to me.” He looked back down at Chloe, grinning proudly. When he saw her face, his own expression fell a bit. He drew back a little and venom filled his voice when he said, “You’re not better than me, Miss Hot Tub High School.”   
Chloe crossed her arms. “I would give anything to take back that movie, and you know that, Lucifer. You’re just being an asshole.”  
He laughed sardonically. “And you’re calling me a hooker because I do what I need to.” He looked like he was trying to smile, but it ended up as a snarl. “You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Chloe. I was born and immediately named after the devil. You don’t get to judge me.”  
Chloe fought down the anger in her chest from being talked to in that tone, and when she had finally wrestled it to submission, she felt the guilt in her stomach. She bit her lip. Her pride told her the best option was to huff and change the subject, and she very nearly did. But she reminded herself that she was supposed to be the more mature of the two.   
“You’re right,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes, “I’m sorry.”  
He looked her up and down in shock.   
She added, “Now if you’re done being wounded, I think I know how I can get us into Grey’s dorm.”  
~.~  
Chloe led Lucifer to the dorm security office and gave him the quick details on the way. Her ex-boyfriend was the head of the security team for her building, and he’d been trying to get back onto her good side lately.   
“And it’s purely coincidental that you thought of this plan while we discussed my whoring myself out?” Lucifer asked. He leaned against the exterior wall, arms crossed.   
“Purely coincidental,” she confirmed. “I think you should wait outside. I don’t need him getting jealous.”  
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a carton of cigarettes. “And why would I make him jealous?” he tested with one eyebrow raised. He shook a cigarette out into his hand.   
“Fuck off. And you know you can’t smoke here.” Chloe pushed open the glass door and walked into the lobby. It had been chilly outside, but the inside was somehow even colder. She shivered then tried to pull herself together as she approached the front desk.   
A female uniformed security guard was standing at the front desk, flipping through a binder. She glanced up when Chloe approached. “Can I help you?” she asked.   
Chloe smiled at her like the movie star she was. “Is Dan Espinoza around?”  
The girl craned her neck to look back into the offices. “I think so. He might be busy though.”  
“Would you mind letting him know that Chloe Decker is here?”  
The security guard turned to do as asked, but before she could walk off, Dan appeared behind her. He was clearly trying to look serious, but a small smile broke through. “Hey, Chlo,” he said. “What’s up?”  
“Can I talk to you?”  
Dan motioned back toward his office, and Chloe walked around to follow him. She sat down at his desk while he closed the door behind them. He sat across from her, conspicuously adjusting his nameplate. “What can I do for you?” he asked.   
“I need a favor,” Chloe started, smiling nervously. She pretended to play with her sleeves. “I totally get if you can’t do it, but I have to ask.”  
Dan leaned back in his seat, clasping his hands behind his head. “Just ask, Chloe.”  
“There’s this guy… He has some pictures of me that I really don’t need getting out. The anniversary of my dad’s funeral is coming up.” She paused for dramatic effect, because she’d been dating Dan when it happened and he knew about The Picture.   
“You need me to talk to him?” Dan jumped in. A cool anger was already rising in his eyes. He fiddled with his keys on his desk.   
One thing about Dan was that he never stopped loving. Even after he and Chloe had broken up—after many screaming matches and hurt feelings—she had never had any doubt that he still had her back. She might have to degrade herself a little bit to stay on his good side though.   
“No, see, that’s the thing,” Chloe replied, grimacing. “It’s Grey Cooper.”  
“Grey… Cooper. He’s the kid who got his brains knocked out.”   
Chloe made a mental note of that; she hasn’t known until now how Grey had died.   
“Yeah. But I think I know where the pictures are, so…”  
“I see.” Dan put down his keys and stared intensely at Chloe. He didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Well—ask.”  
Chloe tried not to sigh. “If I could just get into his room for a few minutes. If someone investigating finds those pictures… someone would be willing to pay a lot for them, and the only way for me to prevent that, is it to find them and make sure I have them.”  
“Chloe, you’re asking me to get you access to a murder scene.”  
“I know.”  
They sat in silence for a few seconds. Then, finally, Dan groaned and swiveled his chair toward his computer. He typed in his password. “Only because I don’t want you to go down the spiral of those pictures getting out.”  
Chloe leaned forward and put her hands on his desk. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”  
“I’m making you a temp card that will work for the next half an hour. Get in. Get out. My name does not come up if you get caught. You found it. Understood?”  
“Completely.” Chloe tried not to smile too much as he pulled a card out and scanned it then handed it to her. “You’re the best.”  
Dan looked at her with a thoughtful expression for just a little too long for her comfort. She rose out of her seat. “Thank you again. We’ll have to catch up sometime.”  
Dan raised his eyebrows like he didn’t believe her. “Right. Take care of yourself, Chloe.”  
Chloe swept out of the office and back outside, where it now felt warm in comparison. “Got a keycard,” she said victoriously, brandishing it in front of Lucifer’s face.   
He took a drag from his cigarette and faced away from her to exhale. “That was fast. Is the ex a bit of a one pump chump then?”  
Chloe rolled her eyes and started toward her dorm building. “All I did was ask nicely. You should try it some time.”  
Lucifer dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his foot like an asshole. He took long strides to catch up with her. “You expect me to believe you got access to a crime scene by asking nicely?” He fell into step with her.   
“What can I say? Men like to do things for me.”   
They reached her building and she scanned them in. While they walked up the stairs, Lucifer replied, “Strange. I’ve never felt any inclination to do anything for you.”  
Chloe decided not to mention the breakfasts he had brought her, the Ubers he had paid for, or the fact that he had held doors open for her more times than Dan ever had in their entire relationship. She was pretty sure he was joking anyway, though sometimes it was hard to detect the sarcasm through his accent.   
Chloe scanned the hallway as they walked toward Grey’s room. No one was walking around, and everyone’s doors were closed. Her heart pounded as she unlocked and quietly opened the door. She silently motioned Lucifer in then closed it behind them as softly as possible. She looked through the peephole to make sure no one heard and came out of their room to investigate.   
Once she was satisfied, she turned to look at the room and saw Lucifer already absently picking things up and inspecting them. “Lucifer,” she hissed quietly. “What are you doing?”  
“Looking for clues? Detective-ing?” He shrugged and picked up a notebook sitting on Grey’s desk. He scanned the writing. “I tell you what—Grey was certainly not on the honor roll.”  
Chloe put her sleeve over her hand and yanked the notebook away from him. “You’re getting your fingerprints all over everything.”  
He made an O with his mouth but moved on quickly, now copying her sleeve-over-hand technique.   
Chloe scanned the room. Her eyes settled on his bedpost, which was painted with dried blood. There was also splattered blood on his sheets and on the floor. Theory: he either fell or was shoved, and hit his head pretty damn hard on the bedpost. She was suddenly very aware of the fact that Grey had died here not that long ago. She swallowed.   
Trying to get back to the task at hand, she set about looking for a laptop or phone, something to tell her what Grey had been up to in the hours leading up to his death.   
“I recognize this,” Lucifer said. Chloe looked up to see that he was holding up a watch. He held it dangling on a pencil. “You’re not going to believe me though.”  
Chloe walked over to look at the watch. “I recognize it too,” she said slowly.  
He was looking at her weird. “How do you recognize it?”  
“2Vile was wearing it at the party. The one right before Grey was killed.” She took a step back, crossing her arms. “So… he has to have been here, right?”   
Possibilities started to scroll through her mind, interrupted when Lucifer cleared his throat and said, “The man who shot Delilah was wearing this watch.”  
Chloe’s mind stopped. She frowned. She could see in Lucifer’s face that he was watching her, waiting for a reaction—or for her to pull a grand explanation out of her brain. When she didn’t immediately say anything, he said, “Our shooter and 2Vile wouldn’t be sharing a watch.”  
“No, I doubt that.” Chloe bit her lip and started to pace but stopped when she remembered the blood stains on the carpet. “Okay. Okay. So let’s say that this watch we have is 2Vile's because that makes the most sense. He certainly has the money to have bought it.” Lucifer nodded but didn’t speak up, letting her get through a thought for once. “Then a reasonable leap would be that the shooter got it from him. 2Vile… likes the watch. He offers to pay the shooter and gives him the same nice watch as a deposit beforehand?”  
She opened her arms, giving Lucifer a questioning look. “What do you think?”  
“I think you’re onto something.” He lowered the watch back down onto the desk. “But now 2Vile’s watch is here… Somehow the night of the party he finds out that Grey was Delilah’s other man… He comes here to confront him—we both saw how drunk 2Vile was—and things get heated. They fight, and then…” He motioned to the bloody bedpost.   
Chloe soaked it in. Until this moment, she still hadn’t been completely on board with the murder conspiracy that Lucifer was convinced of. Now, though, it seemed undeniable that 2Vile had something to do with it.   
A sweep of the room didn’t turn up anything as interesting as the watch. His phone and laptop must have already been taken by the police. Once they’d decided there was nothing else to help their case, Chloe used the peephole to check the coast before quietly opening and closing the door behind them. They shuffled wordlessly over to her dorm.   
Luckily, Ella wasn’t there. Chloe sat down at her desk and pulled her laptop out of her backpack. She googled the details she could remember about the watch. “That watch is worth like $2000.”  
Lucifer whistled. He leaned with his hip against her bed. “Not something you just lose track of without a care. So where do we go from here, Detective?”  
Chloe slouched in her chair. She thought for a moment. “I guess we see how we can get to 2Vile, make him turn himself in. It’s not like we can tell the cops we were in Grey’s room to see the watch.” She did a quick Google search. “There’s a basketball game on Friday. Let’s go to that, see if we can figure out some more about 2Vile and the other guys on the team.”  
Lucifer looked at her with some disbelief. “That’s it?” he asked, gaping.   
She had to admit it was a sentiment echoing one in her own mind as well. She wanted to go guns blazing into 2Vile’s house right now, but ultimately there wasn’t much they could do without looking like the bad guys. They had no good reason for knowing that 2Vile’s watch had been in Grey’s room. They really had no good reason for still investigating Delilah’s death, which the LAPD had already called a closed case.   
“That’s it,” she said.   
He groaned and flopped down backward on her bed. She saw him reach for his pocket then realize he shouldn’t pull out his box of cigarettes here. It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen him smoke much before this, but today it seemed he couldn’t keep his mind off of it. She wondered if the presence of and fight with his brother, compounded with the murders, had added stress that he was trying to curtail with the smoking.   
“Well what are we supposed to do until then?” he whined.   
“We could work on our actual project,” Chloe said coolly.   
Lucifer turned to glare at her. Then he sighed and stared back at the ceiling. “You’re really a thorn in my side, Chloe Decker.”  
.~.   
Lucifer crossed his arms on the table and set his head down on it, pouting. His split lip was starting to scab over--though it was swelling now and looked even worse than it had the first day Chloe saw it. The bruising around his eye was turning purple and green. Overall, he would have looked like a pretty pathetic image if Chloe hadn’t known better.   
“Stop being a baby,” she said. She shoved a folder full of papers across the table at him. “I literally printed out articles for you to look at. All you need to do is read them and make some slides. I have to believe you’re capable of that.”   
Lucifer slapped his hand down dramatically on the folder and dragged it toward him. “I suppose.”   
“Seriously, Lucifer, I came all the way over here just to try to get you to work on this. Can you at least not act like an asshole?” As Chloe said it, she looked around Lux’s breakroom warily. It was clear that nobody took responsibility for caring for this room. By far the most concerning thing in Chloe’s immediate view was a row of used shot glasses right next to the timesheet clock.   
He finally sat up and opened up the folder, rifling through the articles Chloe had printed out. “I was kind of hoping when I told you this was the only time I had, that you’d just give up.”  
Chloe rolled her eyes. “You know me better than that by now,” she said then opened her laptop and started working on her own portion of the project. She knew if she continued to feed into his whining that they would never get any work done. She’d decided that the best training method was going to be that of teaching a cat right and wrong: ignoring him. If she didn’t entertain him, he would eventually get bored and just do what she wanted him to.   
As he read through the articles, he made a few quips, but when Chloe didn’t acknowledge any of them, he eventually stopped. By the time his hour lunch was over, he had actually written out an outline for his slides. He handed it to Chloe. “Here, teacher,” he said.   
Chloe took it from him. “I’m only taking this to keep it safe. You’re getting it back so you can do the slides, not me.”  
Lucifer stood, stretching his arms up as he uncurled. He yawned and fluffed his hair. His all black server’s uniform accentuated his long limbs. Chloe looked up at him, an unwelcome and overwhelming moment of attraction passing over her. She swallowed, remembering suddenly how it had felt to be in his lap with his hands in her hair.   
She slammed her laptop shut, the sound resetting her brain back to normal. “Alright, well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow for the game,” she said jerkily. She started to walk toward the back door that Lucifer had told her to come in through.   
“Hey,” he said to stop her, “Do you wanna come sit at the bar for a bit? Maze and I are bartending. It’ll be on the house.”  
Chloe hesitated. Before meeting Lucifer, she had never been one for middle-of-the-week drinking, or for murder investigating for that matter. She debated it quickly. Lux was a high-end place; getting food or drink on the house was no small thing. It would be silly to pass this up, even if she was going to have the most annoying bartender in the world.   
“Alright,” she agreed, and Lucifer, grinning, led her out to the main area of the club. The music was immediately too loud for Chloe’s senses. After a few moments, she adjusted and was able to focus on the room around her, soaked in purple lighting. They walked past the dance floor, where people were packed in, grinding drunkenly to the music. When they reached the bar, Lucifer pulled out a seat for her before slipping back behind the bar.   
Maze was standing on the other end of the bar, chatting with a customer while she poured a drink. She was smiling in a friendly way that Chloe could tell was fake even from this distance. When Maze turned away from the customer, she noticed Chloe and skipped over. “Well, hello, Chloe,” she said, smirking. She looked over at where Lucifer was washing his hands.   
Chloe tried not to feel nervous. Something about Maze made her feel so inadequate and lame. “Hey, Maze. Lucifer talked me into staying for a drink.”  
“I’m sure he did,” Maze responded. “What can I get for ya?”   
“Why don’t you make me something you think I’ll like?”   
Maze winked at her. “You got it.”  
Lucifer slid over next to Maze. “I’m sorry, Maze, is this customer bothering you?” he said. “I can ask Mike to kick her out if you’re uncomfortable.”  
“Don’t make her regret staying that quickly,” Maze responded, rolling her eyes. She pulled a glass from under the bar and grabbed the well vodka, shaking ice off of it. “You think she’ll like a sex on the beach?”  
“I sure hope so.” Lucifer’s eyes gleamed as he watched Chloe balk. His attention was drawn away when someone from the dance floor broke away and approached the bar. He walked over to where they were, and Chloe watched him take their orders, nodding.   
While Maze made Chloe’s drink, she complained about the stupid customers she had had that night and described the violent ways she wanted to punish them for making her job harder. Chloe tried to pay attention, but her gaze kept getting drawn back to where Lucifer was shaking a drink and then straining it into a glass. He did it with such grace that Chloe had to remind herself he’d been doing this for less than a year.   
Maze slid her finished drink across the bar to Chloe. “Try that out.”  
Chloe took a sip. It was sweet and citrusy. “Turns out I do like sex on the beach,” she said, grinning. “Thanks.”   
Maze tapped the bar then walked off to take someone else’s order. She was quickly replaced with Lucifer, who leaned across the bar to say in a low voice, “Think this couple over there is a tinder date or an awkward coworker date?” He motioned with his head to the couple he had just served.   
Chloe looked furtively in their direction. The guy took a sip of his drink before saying something that the girl smiled politely in response to. Chloe looked back at Lucifer. “Definitely a tinder date. There will not be a second date.”  
“I agree.” Lucifer nodded. He pulled away back to his own side of the bar. “You like that?” He motioned to her drink.  
Chloe nodded. She tried not to stare down into her drink.   
“Well don’t have too many of ‘em,” Lucifer said, reaching for a coaster to slip under her glass. “You might end up out on that dance floor. Maze has some heavy pours when she likes someone.” He motioned out to the dancing crowd, which had gotten even more chaotic just while Chloe had been sitting there.   
“You think she likes me?” was all Chloe could think to ask.   
“Oh yeah,” Lucifer chuckled. “You would know if she didn’t.”  
That tracked.   
Chloe glanced down at the backpack she had set on the floor. Part of her wanted to just go home and work on her project, but another part secretly found the idea of drinking a few Sex on the Beaches and finding someone to get sweaty with incredibly appealing. She reminded herself that she’d already messed up and ended up in magazines one too many times lately.   
She shook her head to bring herself back to her senses.  
“Noted,” she said to Lucifer. “I need to be at peak performance tomorrow.”  
“Right that,” Lucifer responded perkily. He leaned on his elbows one the bar. “We have a major conspiracy to take down. Can’t have you oversleeping like you are so prone to do.”  
“Shut up.” Chloe rolled her eyes. She found a drop of water left by her cup on the bar and started to move it around with her finger.   
She thought about how the only things waiting for her at her dorm were her bed and her Netflix account. Ella would probably be out with the new boy she was dating and was obsessed with. Sitting at this bar and playing friendly with Lucifer was her best bet for a fun night.   
A reckless jolt overtook her and she said, “What time do you get off? I could drive you home.”  
Lucifer’s eyes lit up. He lifted an eyebrow and ignored a man who approached the bar. “Ten. I opened. You don’t have to wait two hours for me though.”  
Chloe shrugged. “I don’t have much else to do. Plus I think I’ll have to have you captive to ask for your input on this project.”  
He smirked at her and nodded. “Alright. I’ll try to get out of here a little early.” He tapped the bar then pushed away to handle the customer. Chloe fussed with her ponytail absently as she watched him pour a vodka shot. The man slid cash to him and waved his hand when Lucifer tried to hand him change. Lucifer tucked the extra cash into his pocket.   
As soon as he had finished the transaction, a group of three women walked up. They were all probably in their thirties. One wore a plastic crown with a cheap veil. Lucifer smiled as he greeted them. One of them reached out and touched his arm as she ordered. Although Lucifer didn’t react to it, Chloe had to fight down the urge to storm over. They paid with a debit card, and when the youngest looking one signed the receipt, she clearly wrote down her number. Lucifer didn’t pick it up until they had walked away, and when he saw the number scrawled on it, he chuckled and stuck the receipt into the register without another glance.   
Something heavy that had settled in Chloe’s chest dissipated. She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t jealousy. She had no claim to Lucifer, first of all, and even if she had, she would be crazy to want him. He was a promiscuous, irresponsible asshole—and yet, when he caught her gaze and winked, her stomach flipped over and she pretended to be interested in her phone’s screen.   
When he had a lull between customers, Lucifer approached Chloe with a tall glass. He set it in front of her. “Coke, for my designated driver.”  
“Thanks.” She took a sip through the straw. “You’re popular.”  
Lucifer laughed. “Yeah,” he said airily. “I’m making pretty good tips tonight, so can’t complain.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, another bachelorette party materialized from the dance floor. He rushed to take their orders, and Chloe returned to scrolling her social media.   
At ten o'clock exactly, Lucifer disappeared into the break room and re-emerged with his backpack. He came over to where Chloe had been posted up, and they headed out the back door to her car. “Thanks for waiting,” Lucifer said as he pulled his seatbelt across his chest.   
Chloe started the car. She almost admitted that it was the most interesting way she could have spent her night, but instead just said, “No problem. I need you to get home and into bed quickly so you’re at peak performance tomorrow.”  
He chuckled. “I’m always at peak performance, if you catch my drift.”  
She rolled her eyes and put the car into reverse. “Do you have class in the morning?”  
He shook his head. “You?”  
“I have my stupid forensic science class,” Chloe answered, trying not to sigh. She pulled out of their parking spot and navigated to the road. “I just hate my group. They’re all these guys who think they’re so smart, and I’m just the dumb blonde who they’ve all seen naked. They don’t listen to me.” She pressed her lips together hard.  
“Fuck that,” Lucifer said. “You’re probably smarter than all of them combined. Don’t let them walk all over you.”  
Chloe was struck silent for a moment. She tried not to gape. “Oh, uh, thanks. But it’s not that easy. If I speak up too much, then I’ll just be a bitch.”  
“So be a bitch. They’re idiots; they deserve it.” Lucifer rolled down the window and rested his hand on the outside of the window. He set his head on the frame and let the air hit his face. Chloe glanced away from the road long enough to see his small smile lit up by the streetlights. For a second, Chloe felt something like affection for him--which he ruined by saying, “Can’t imagine you’d let me smoke in here?”  
“Obviously not.”  
“Had to ask.”  
When Chloe pulled up in front of Lucifer’s house, she said quietly, “Alright, well, I’ll see you tomorrow?”  
Lucifer stayed in his seat, turning to her. “Yeah. You wanna meet me here? I’ll let you know what time to come over.” He met her eyes and matched her low tone. Chloe was firmly aware of how close his face was to hers. The car felt a lot smaller than it normally did.   
“That sounds good.” Chloe licked her lips. She couldn’t quite pinpoint why her heart was pounding.  
“Alright.”  
“Alright.”   
Lucifer cleared his throat and looked like he was going to reach for the door handle. Chloe kissed him. It lacked any sort of grace, and she nearly missed his mouth. He froze for a moment, so she almost pulled away, but he put a hand on her arm and returned the kiss. It didn’t last very long before Chloe pulled away, smiling. “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow.”  
He visibly swallowed. “Yeah. Okay. See you tomorrow.” He hauled himself out of the car and closed the door gently. She waved to him through the window and waited until he’d gone through his front door to drive away.   
.~.  
The next day, Chloe headed over to Lucifer’s house a little before the game. When she knocked, Maze’s voice responded, “Door’s open!” Chloe walked in and didn’t see anyone until she passed by the kitchen doorway. Maze was leaning on the counter, sipping a beer and chatting with a man who sat facing her. Chloe shuffled into the kitchen and waved. “Hey, Maze.”  
Maze noticed her. “Heya, Chloe.”  
“Is Lucifer around? He told me to come by.” She made eye contact with the man and smiled politely. He nodded in acknowledgment.   
Maze nodded then abruptly barked, “Lucifer! Your girl is here!” Chloe panicked, wondering if Lucifer had told Maze about their chaste kiss the night before.   
The man’s eyebrows shot up. He looked Chloe up and down while Lucifer swept into the room. He was shirtless and rubbed at his wet hair with a towel. He grinned when he saw Chloe. “Hello, Darling.” He looked briefly at the other man in the kitchen. “I see you’ve met my brother.”  
“Your…” Chloe turned to look at the stranger again with this new information. “Brother?” He was tall like Lucifer, but that was where the similarities ended. The most obvious difference was that this new man was black, and in case that left any doubt, his build was significantly stockier.   
Lucifer draped his towel over a chair and headed to the fridge. He pulled out a beer and looked questioningly at Chloe, who nodded. He grabbed a second one. “Yes, an unfortunate houseguest. He won’t be here long though, so don’t get attached.”  
“Oh, I won’t?” his brother responded. He looked at Lucifer’s turned back, and Chloe couldn’t tell if he was fixing his gaze on the scars or not.   
Lucifer spun and gave him a testy look. A silent exchange that Chloe wasn’t privy to happened between them.   
Chloe cleared her throat. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Chloe. It’s nice to meet you.”  
The brother shook her hand, his face set in a vaguely annoyed expression. “Amenadiel. You seem surprised by me.”  
Chloe tried not to sputter. She looked desperately to Lucifer, but he was trying to get Maze to hand him the bottle opener. “I just didn’t expect Lucifer’s brother to be…” Maze’s head shot up. “... so handsome.”  
“That’s disgusting, Chloe,” Lucifer drawled. He took advantage of Maze’s distraction and yanked the bottle opener from her hand.   
“She means black,” Maze said while Lucifer popped open their beers and handed Chloe one. Chloe felt her face flush.   
Lucifer and Amenadiel chuckled at the same time, and the sound was the first brotherly similarity that Chloe could find in them. Lucifer took a long swig of his beer. Chloe took a sip of her own just to have something to do. For a moment, she thought no one was going to offer her an explanation. Then Lucifer finally said, “I’m adopted. We all are except Amenadiel.” She could see in his eyes that he knew exactly what a treat that information was to her. Her stomach fluttered a little bit.  
“Oh. Okay.” She drank more of her beer, trying to seem casual as she knew Maze and Amenadiel wouldn’t find her Lucifer Investigation nearly as endearing as he did. Silence settled over the kitchen long enough that Chloe decided she could pull Lucifer away politely. “Can we…” She motioned toward the hallway.   
Lucifer nodded and swept them both out of the room with his hand on her back. As they headed to Lucifer’s room, Maze shouted after them, “Door open, kiddos! No funny business!”  
Lucifer rolled his eyes and slammed his door shut behind them. He sat in his desk chair while Chloe flopped onto his bed. “I know something you don’t know,” she sing-songed.  
He perked up. “Oh?”  
“Yeah.” Chloe didn’t play poker but she thought she might be pretty good. She knew how to keep her cards close to her chest. “So what’s your brother doing here? Is he staying here?”  
Lucifer sighed, but it almost came out as a laugh. He glanced briefly toward the closed door. “If anything he says is to be trusted, Amenadiel has been sent down here with orders to not return until I am returning with him.” Chloe waited. Lucifer smirked and continued, “It seems that I am still the only Morningstar child to have left that horrible nest, and my father would like to remedy that.”  
Chloe frowned. “They can’t seriously think they’ll just drag you kicking and screaming back to Oregon and you’ll stay? You’re an adult.”  
Lucifer merely shrugged. He didn’t seem to realize that he had never told her that his family lived in Oregon. “I don’t even want to see how Amenadiel would fare fending for himself on the streets of Los Angeles so I’m allowing him to stay here until he gives up and fucks off. Feel free to take no shit from him. Now…” He looked at her expectantly.   
Chloe tried to gauge if she could get anything else out of him and decided to settle for now. “Ella is dating a security guy from the dorms. The basketball team asked him to bounce at an ‘exclusive’ post-game party tonight.” She paused to watch Lucifer start to smile. He looked impressed, and she fought down a smile. “I got us added to the list.”  
“You amaze me every day, Chloe,” Lucifer said. He rubbed his hands together in excitement. “At the team house?”  
She shook her head. “Jimmy Barnes’ house. He’s some benchwarmer with a rich dad. Think cocaine and champagne, not beer and cornhole.”  
“Sounds right up my alley.”  
“I thought it would.”  
Chloe relaxed back on Lucifer’s bed, working on her beer while Lucifer picked out a party-appropriate outfit. As he stood staring into the closet, she watched the scars on his back stretch and contract with his movements. A million questions bubbled up. Why would a father who could do that to him care so much about bringing him home? Did Amenadiel have awful injuries like that too? How could Amenadiel, in good conscience, bring his brother back to that? Instead, she asked, “Why do you and Amenadiel have different accents?”  
Lucifer pulled a predictably plain button up out of his closet and started to pull it on. “I went to boarding school in Wales as a child.”  
“Just you?”  
“Just me.”  
Chloe kept silent while Lucifer pulled out a different pair of pants and started to change. He glanced quickly at her. He reached for a watch on his desk. She maintained her silence until, while he fiddled with the watch clasp, he said, “I was a bit of a problem child.” He turned to search for socks and shoes. “I think it was just easier to send me away and let Christian school sort me out.”  
“How old were you?”  
“Six.” He sat down next to her on the bed to pull on his shoes. “I did most of my primary school there, and then when I was twelve, my father brought me home to be homeschooled with the rest of my siblings.”  
He paused with one shoe on. He turned slowly to look at Chloe. “Did they catch the guy who shot your dad?”  
Chloe startled. “Yeah, he was sentenced to twenty years a few months ago,” she said. Despite the fact that the information was easily google-able, she found herself instinctively getting angry at him for asking personal questions. Her own hypocrisy was not lost on her, and she realized that he was probably making that point by asking, so she tried to swallow her pride.   
He nodded wordlessly and finished tying his shoe. He stood up, grabbed a blazer, and put it on. “Shall we go?”   
Chloe nodded and rose as well. She briefly checked her hair in his mirror. “So am I nice to Amenadiel or no?”  
Lucifer smiled at her and set a hand on her back, leading her out the door. “I would like nothing more than to see you tear him apart.”  
“Your wish is my command.”  
They bid their goodbyes to Maze and Amenadiel then took an Uber to campus. They arrived at the basketball game early enough to find seats close to the front of the student section bleachers. Chloe sat down without a second thought, but Lucifer hesitated. He shifted back and forth like a cat deciding where to lay. Eventually he sat beside her, folding so that his knees were nearly as high as his chin. A group of young freshmen filed in after them, and the sight of Lucifer, lanky and dressed in a blazer, sitting next to a kid in basketball shorts and a tank top was the funniest thing Chloe had seen all day.   
“Do you go to a lot of these?” she asked him.   
He grimaced. “No, this is not one of my usual haunts. Does this bench feel sticky to you?”  
Chloe didn’t respond, instead opting to slap his arm a few times and point to the court. “The team is here.” The young men dressed in suits filed across the court from the lobby headed toward the locker room. 2Vile led them, and she could see the one that she was pretty sure was Jimmy trailing near the back of the pack. She noticed one of them check the time on his wrist. Wait. She looked up at the Jumbotron to get a better look at them.   
“They all have it,” she said in shock.   
“Hm?” Lucifer had apparently been glaring down at 2Vile.   
“They all have the same watch. 2Vile has his. They all have it.” Chloe tried to find as many wrists as she could see on the screen. Every single one of the players was wearing the same expensive watch.   
“Well, would you look at that,” Lucifer said. He frowned and tapped his fingers on his knees. “The one in Grey’s room must be his. They can’t all be able to afford a two thousand dollar watch.”  
Chloe shook her head. “Someone has to have given it to them-- and whoever gave watches to the entire team has to have also given it to the shooter, right?”  
“I suppose so.”  
The team had made their way into the locker rooms and pregame music started playing. Chloe looked around and was surprised by how much the stadium had filled up already. The few games she had gone to in the past had been sparsely attended, mostly by players’ friends and girlfriends.  
Now, the seats and bleachers were nearly completely full of fans. A lot of people wore the school colors in an unexpected show of school pride.   
Cheerleaders started to line up at the end of the court. As they took formation, they left a spot in the front row open. Delilah’s spot. Chloe turned to look at Lucifer, and she could see in his face when he realized the same thing. He cleared his throat and did not meet her gaze.   
A group of girls filled in the empty space next to Chloe. “Mark is getting scouted tonight,” one of them was saying. “We didn’t think he was gonna be able to play after college, but someone called him this week from the NBA.”  
“Oh my God,” one of her friends responded. “You’re gonna be an NBA girlfriend!”  
The first girl giggled. “Well, nothing’s official yet. Plus—even Jimmy has someone out to look at him tonight, so it barely even means anything.”  
“Yeah, but Mark is way better than Jimmy. I’m sure they’ll want him.”  
Chloe pulled out her phone and scrolled through texts so she looked busy and wasn’t obviously eavesdropping. She had heard from multiple independent people that Jimmy was a benchwarmer, and now he was getting scouted? She quickly opened her notes app and typed out, “The team is getting crazy attention now. Everyone’s getting scouted.”  
She held it in front of Lucifer to read. He pursed his lips. “Ah, how tragedy draws spectators.”  
The players came back out in their uniforms now and started warm ups. A few minutes later, the opposing team joined them. The lights on the seats dimmed a little, and Lucifer immediately pulled a flask out from under his blazer. Chloe hadn’t even seen him grab it before they left.   
When he took a long swig from it, she hissed, “Lucifer.”  
He looked at her innocently. “You want some?”  
“No! We’re doing work here.”  
He rolled his eyes. “We’re at a college basketball game, Chloe. There isn’t a vodka-less water bottle in the building.” He held it out to her and she pushed it back toward him. He shrugged and took another sip. “Would you like to hear the ‘I’m under a lot of stress and need it to loosen up’ speech?”  
“I would not.”  
“Fair.”  
When the game had started, Chloe found herself leaning forward in her seat. To her own surprise, she whooped with everyone else when the first basket of the game was made. Lucifer looked at her in shock. “I didn’t take you for a sports fan, Detective.”  
She motioned vaguely toward the game. “Everyone likes basketball. You don’t watch basketball?” He shook his head. “Hm. You strike me as a played-one-season-in-high-school-and-won’t-shut-up-about-it kind of guy.”  
He chuckled. “No”—he paused while everyone screamed about a foul—“none of my schooling situations lended themselves to that. My high school wasn’t exactly a Friday night lights and prom king kind of situation.” He laughed when he said it, and Chloe didn’t get the impression that this particularly bothered him. To be fair, she couldn’t really picture him dressed in a too big tuxedo taking pictures with some girl with braces.   
“Me too,” she admitted, surprising herself. She looked out at the game instead of at him. “Child actors don’t really get to go to normal school. So no girlhood fantasy prom for me either.”  
“You wish you had one?” Lucifer asked.   
Chloe shrugged. “I guess. I’m sure I wasn’t missing much, but I grew up watching all these movies about that stereotypical first slow dance. I dunno.”  
“Hm.”   
Someone fouled 2Vile, and the game stopped for him to come to the free throw line. He sunk both shots easily. “He’s really good,” Chloe remarked.   
Lucifer nodded. “Some pro team has been courting him for a while, from what Delilah’s said. It was a big deal since people from here aren’t really top picks usually.”  
“Until their peers started dying, and suddenly they’re interesting.”  
After the game, Chloe and Lucifer took their time following the masses out of the stadium and walked a few blocks from campus to pick up dinner from a food truck while they waited for an appropriate time to show up at the party. Lucifer paid for both of them with the wad of cash he’d left the bar with the night before. After about an hour, they called an Uber, which drove them through the rich neighborhood that a lot of Chloe’s mom’s friends lived in.   
They were dropped off in front of a large white house with too many pillars to still look classy. Cars were pressed tight against each other in the driveway, and there were already plastic ups littering the lawn. Chloe pitied the help that was going to have to clean it up in the morning.   
Chloe recognized Ella’s boyfriend standing at the door with his arms crossed. “Doug!” she shouted and waved.   
He gave her a nod. “Go on in, Chloe. This the devil guy?”  
“I assume I’m the only devil guy she knows,” Lucifer responded dryly for her.   
Doug nodded at him as well, and they walked inside. They entered into a huge living room, which was dimly lit and pounding with music. People were lounging on couches, pressed together. There were already a few lines of coke neatly laid out on a tray on the coffee table.   
Chloe recognized one of the people as the guy who had poured their drinks at the last party. He noticed them quickly. “Ay! Lucifer and the lovely lady!”  
Lucifer lifted a hand in greeting. “Trevor.”  
Trevor stood up and walked over to talk to them. “How’d you end up here?” He turned to Chloe. “You aren’t a cheerleader, are you?”  
“I know a guy who knows a guy,” Lucifer answered breezily before she could say anything. Chloe saw his eyes linger on the cocaine on the table for a second. He cleared his throat. “You guys played a good game tonight.” He reached out to shake Trevor’s hand. “I heard there were a lot of scouts there.”  
Trevor nodded. “Yeah, none for me since I’m a sophomore, but 2Vile’s basically guaranteed an NBA spot when he graduates.” He motioned with his head to another room they couldn’t see into. “And a bunch of the seniors have way more opportunities now than they did a few weeks ago.”  
“Before Delilah and Grey died,” Lucifer said.   
Trevor frowned. “Yeah. Before Delilah and Grey died.”  
Lucifer was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Would you mind getting Chloe a drink? I’m gonna go have a quick chat with 2Vile.” Chloe reached out to touch his arm gently. She didn’t want to be left with someone she didn’t know, but, more importantly, she didn’t want to be left out of the investigation.   
He leaned down to talk into her ear, in a way that must have looked affectionate to an outsider like Trevor. He said, “Don’t want to drag you into a conversation with someone you don’t know.” It sounded caring, but what it really meant was that he wanted to keep 2Vile from knowing her connection to him for now. She was still his secret agent.   
Chloe nodded at him then turned to Trevor. “You guys got good beer?”   
Trevor grinned at her. “Allow me to show you the selection.” He led her away from Lucifer into a large kitchen.   
A few players stood around the kitchen island, pouring shots and chatting about the ways their defense could be improved. “Maybe if Trevor could keep his arms up,” one of them said loudly when they entered.   
“Go fuck yourself,” Trevor responded as he opened the double-doored fridge. It held the largest selection of drinks Chloe had ever seen outside of a grocery store. “Jimmy’s parents are loaded. Can you imagine growing up in this place?”  
Chloe decided not to mention that she had been raised by a moviestar. Still, even her childhood home hadn’t been this nice. This place screamed affluence, but she guessed it was overstated for the family’s pride.   
“Me, I’m on scholarship,” Trevor continued, pulling out a beer and setting it on the counter. “Jimmy’s lucky his parents are loaded, because, between you and me, he never would have gotten a scholarship. What do you want?”  
Chloe scanned the options. “I’ll take a flat tire.” He pulled out the bottle, popped off the cap on the opener magnetted to the fridge, and handed it to her.   
“What do his parents do?” Chloe asked, mainly to keep the conversation going until Lucifer came back to her with information.   
Trevor leaned against the counter, popping open his can of beer. “His mom’s a model. I don’t really know what his dad does. Something important I guess.” He shrugged. “Gotta be something high up because the dude throws money around like it’s nothing. He bought the whole team these watches.” He held up his wrist.  
Chloe’s stomach flipped. She’d been working under the assumption that 2Vile or his father had bought the watches with no real proof. She hadn’t even considered that there were other wealthy players on the team. Jimmy--the benchwarmer Jimmy.   
“That’s really nice. Must’ve been expensive,” Chloe said, trying to keep her voice from breaking.   
“Yeah.” Trevor looked down at the watch, twisting his wrist around. “I googled it. They’re like a couple thousand bucks each. You know how many guys are on the team? Fifteen.”  
Chloe didn’t even know how to continue to act casual. Her mind raced while she tried to make sense of this new information. She could see Trevor looking at her unsurely, but it was just entirely out of her acting capabilities to continue playing Lucifer’s dumb blonde armcandy right now. “Well, fourteen now,” she said finally.   
Trevor faltered. He set his beer back down on the counter behind him. “Yeah,” he said sadly. “I miss Grey, that motherfucker. Whole team does. Everyone’s kind of paranoid. Like--there’s this conspiracy theory going around that the timing of Delilah’s death and Grey’s can’t be a coincidence.” He dropped his voice, checking that they weren’t being eavesdropped on. “Grey was really broken up about Delilah’s death, like more than the rest of us. He kept trying to get the cops to look into it more, since they never found a motive.” He shook his head, looking down at his feet.   
Okay, this was too much. Chloe felt her heart pounding, like it knew that she was close. “I’m--uh--I’m gonna go find Lucifer,” she said, already starting to walk away. “Thanks for the beer!”  
The living room had filled up quite a bit when she reentered it. The cheerleading team seemed to have arrived as a group, and Chloe had to shove past people to get to the doorway Lucifer had gone through and into a dining room. She found 2Vile talking to a player she didn’t know. No sign of Lucifer.   
“2Vile!” she shouted, and he looked at her with the same barely hidden confusion that he’d had the first time they met. She didn’t take the time to re-introduce herself. “You seen Lucifer?”  
He continued to look perplexed, but nodded. He pointed through another doorway that Chloe could see a hallway through. “He rushed off that way like a minute ago,” he said slowly, and Chloe didn’t respond before hurrying in that direction.   
The hallway had way too many doors in Chloe’s opinion. A person could get lost in here even after living here a month. A few doors were open, and Chloe furtively glanced into them as she walked down the hallway. One was a bathroom. Another hosted a couple making out.   
The third that she inspected was a bedroom, and if the textbooks on the desk and basketball jersey hanging on the hamper were any indication, it was Jimmy’s room. No one was in there, so Chloe looked both ways before stepping carefully in.  
It was cleaned in a way that Chloe was familiar with, done by a housekeeper who took pride in her work and had affection for Jimmy. The only mess in the room was the schoolwork spread out on the desk. She inspected it without touching, and saw two college brochures. One of them had a sticky note with a number scrawled on it. A recruiter’s number, probably.   
Chloe slowly opened a drawer. It was mostly a mess of school supplies and receipts. She opened another one: keys, library card, a baggie of weed and a lighter. She tugged at the bottom drawer, but it was locked.   
“I think you’re lost,” someone said, and Chloe jumped. She spun to see Jimmy standing in the doorway. She wondered if he recognized her from the other party. He smiled at her thinly. “Bathroom’s one door back.”  
Chloe plastered on a smile. “Silly me. Thanks.”   
She walked toward the doorway, but Jimmy made no move to let her through. He looked her up and down. “Thinking you were gonna find a toilet in my desk drawer?” He looked vaguely amused, like he was gearing up for a game.   
“I was looking for a lighter, actually,” Chloe lied. She hadn’t drinken much of her beer, but tried to act drunk. “The guy I’m here with forgot his, and he’ll be grumpy all night if he doesn’t get to smoke.”  
Jimmy stepped forward, farther into the room and closer to Chloe. He pulled the door shut behind him, and Chloe felt a chill in her gut. She felt her breathing pick up when he turned the lock. Either he thought she was drunk enough to take advantage, or he knew she was up to something.   
They stared each other down for a few tense moments until Jimmy finally said, “Why don’t you tell me what you’re really doing in here.”  
“I was looking for a lighter.”  
“There’s a lighter in the drawer you just closed.”  
Fuck. “Oh my God, I am so blind,” Chloe said, giggling. She doubled back to the desk like she was going to grab the lighter.   
When she reached for the drawer, Jimmy said, “Stop. I didn’t say you could go into my stuff.”  
“Why’s that? You got something to hide in there?” Chloe asked before she could stop herself. She added a laugh at the end in case she still had a chance of making him think she was joking. She debated her ability to fight her way out of this. He was short for a basketball player, but he was still a basketball player. She had to look up at him, and he definitely worked out more regularly than her. Her chances were slim.   
Jimmy narrowed his eyes at her and tilted his head. “Well, I don’t want Coach knowing I’m smoking weed, do I?”  
“Right, of course. Uh. My date is waiting for me, so I should go or he’s gonna start looking for me.” She pulled out her phone like she was checking for a text message, but started recording a voice message. She tried to walk quickly to the door now that there was an opening, but Jimmy grabbed her arm roughly.   
He shoved her, and she stumbled a few steps back until she hit the wall. “I’ve seen you around, with that Lucifer kid,” he said, and the look in his eyes reminded Chloe of a snake about to strike. He pulled a keyring out of his pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer while she planned an escape route. “You wanna see what’s in here? I saw you trying to get into it.”  
She laughed nervously. “No, it’s okay. Really. I just wanted a lighter.”  
“I don’t think you did,” he responded immediately. “Lucifer and you have been poking around a lot about things that don’t concern you. I thought it was harmless, but I don’t like finding you snooping around in here.”  
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.   
There was no getting out of this, so Chloe blurted out, “Why’d you do it?”  
“Do what?” Jimmy asked mockingly, and he reached into the drawer. He pulled out a handgun, and Chloe froze. She had to remind herself to breathe when her lungs started to hurt. He walked too close to her and pointed the gun at the ground. “Say it. Say what you think I did.”  
Chloe felt tears prick at her eyes. She was not going to cry. “I think you’re about to graduate, and nobody has scouted you, and the team hasn’t gotten any attention, so you paid to have a cheerleader killed to draw publicity to the team. And I think Grey figured you out, so you panicked and killed him yourself.”  
“Well aren’t you smart.” He was looking over her, a panicked and twitchy look about him.  
Chloe and Jimmy stared at each other. She said, “Your plan is falling apart, Jimmy.” She forced him to hold eye contact with her as she continued, “You still have a chance of getting away with it. I don’t have any proof.”  
He raised an eyebrow. “Then tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now to shut you up before you get any.”  
“Because we both know you won’t get away with a third murder.”  
She saw the realization that she was right flash across his face, and she took advantage of the moment to run. She slipped around him and sprinted to the door. She had almost grasped the knob when she heard the gun go off, and a pain in her side told her she’d been shot. She swore and stumbled. She screwed her eyes, trying to breathe through the pain, but it was so intense she couldn’t think about anything else.   
She heard a loud bang, and the door opened. With great effort, she turned her head to see Lucifer bolt in. He looked down at Chloe then dropped to his knee, muttering, “no, no, no”, and she wanted to scream at him for not focusing on the gun in the room.  
Another gunshot filled the room, and Lucifer’s face tightened as he grunted. He shut his eyes tight a second then opened them, stood, and turned. Chloe could hear the sound of a struggle, but couldn’t get herself to turn toward it. She couldn’t tell if, as her eyes struggled to stay open, the fight was winding down or the ringing of her eyes was covering it up.   
Eventually, the blurry image of Lucifer appeared over her. She used up the last of her energy to reach into her pocket and pulled out her phone, which was still recording. Her eyes were sliding shut already, but she felt Lucifer’s hand close around it, and she heard sirens getting closer as she finally lost consciousness.


End file.
